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THE AVERA 


Bible Collection. 


Library of Trinity College, 
DURHAM, N. C. 


, AY 12 10N7 
Received MAY bs 











vy 

















THE 
PRACTICAL COMMENTARY 


on the 






New Testament 






Edited by 






Ww. Robertson Nicoll 
M.A., LL.D. - 












- 
‘ 











The 
PRAC FICAL 
COMMENTARY 


On the New Testament 


Edited by 


W.ROBERTSON NICOLL, LL.D., D.D. 
Editor of ‘‘ The Expositor’s Bible’ 


Volume I. Colossians and Thessalonians, 
Jos—EpH PARKER, D.D. 


Volume II. Ephesians, JosEPpH Parker, D.D. 
Volume III. Peter, | Pe ist: Jowett 
Volume IV. Mark, G. H. Morrison 


Others to be announced. 


These volumes are the first to be announced of a 
great new undertaking similar to the universally 
known Expositor’s Bible. It will be under the direc- 
tion of the editor of that great work, Dr. W. Robert- 
son Nicoll, editor of the British Weekly, and its 
volumes will be the work of the foremost living theo- 
logians. Thoroughly alive to the necessity of taking 
advantage of every help that modern scholarship ~ 
offers, this commentary will at the same time retain 
a healthy conservatism of judgment, and its field of 
usefulness will therefore be as large as its great fore- 
runner, “ The Expositor’s Bible.” 


Every volume of this set will be printed on spe- 
cially made paper, handsomely and strongly bound in 
extra cloth, size crown octavo. 


Price per volume, $1.25, Net 


THE EPISTLE TO THE 


EPHESIANS 


By 
JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. 


ae 


NEW YORK 
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
3&5 West 182 Srreer, NEAR 5t2 AVENUE 
19 











CONTENTS 


THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 


PAGE 


CHAPTER I : ° : : ° ° . 1 
CHAPTER II : j - : 5 . . ae Ss 
CHAPTER III ‘ : - : : 5 A oO 
CHAPTER IV : . ; : : : : Econ 
CHAPTER V : : : : * . : . 149 


SHABERES- VECo a ok soc Cah Aeon 


2264 

















EPHESIANS Ss 





CHAPTER I 


HE first striking term which I observe 
: in this eloquent letter is in chapter i. 

22, 23—‘‘the Church, which is His body.” 
We have lived so much downwards and back- 
wards that we need to be reminded what the 
Apostle meant when he used the two words 
“the Church.” Is it magnifying unduly the 
ignorance of a country in which Bible-reading 
is well-nigh obsolete to suggest that not one 
man in ten could say definitively and with 
the authority of Holy Scripture what the 
expression “the Church” means? Such 
ignorance would stupefy and dishearten the 
most zealous and optimistic teacher of reli- 
gion. Christians themselves so rarely know 
what is meant by the designation “the 
Church ”—so great that it needs no defining 
epithet. We have hung all manner of false 
jewellery upon the neck of this darling of 

1 


D) THE EPISTLE TO 


God: we, who abhor idolatry, are amongst 
the greatest idolators of all. Roman Church, 
Anglican Church, Nonconformist Church | all 
manner of little patchy, discrediting, and 
unworthy adjectives have we attached to 
the great word Church. Yea, and there be 
those who would say, if you uttered that word 
simply, “‘To what church do you refer?” 
Why, there is only one Church. God makes 
no reference to any other church. It is the 
Church which Christ purchased with His 
own blood. That Church He declares to be 
His incarnation, His body, His visibleness ; 
and we, having nothing to do—idle dogs !— 
have invented adjectives and terms of 
limitation. which we have attached to the 
word Church. What higher, nobler defini- 
tion could be found than that which the 
Apostle himself supplies—the body of Christ, 
the new incarnation, the multifold per- 
sonality ? But we thought the Church was 
an institution. Only in a very limited sense 
is that true. It is Christ—His own very 
self. Do not go to the worst instances you 
can find of personal Church-membership so- 
called, and ask, in bantering and satiric 


THE EPHESIANS 3 


tones, whether such instances are to be 
regarded as the body of Christ. That is 
unjust criticism; that is unpardonable ig- 
norance: it is not a standard to which you 
would like to submit your own character. 
This is not a question of instances of 
infirmity, mutilation, incompleteness, and 
the like. There is a nerve running through 
the whole conception symbolised by the 
word Church, which lifts it into a new 
definition and a complete and permanent 
influence. Are we to be taken in our very 
lowest moods, and to be judged when we 
are hardly men, so borne down by infirmity, 
so swallowed up of sorrow, so given away 
to evil passion, envy, jealousy, malice, and 
all uncharitableness? And when we are at 
that zero would it be right for even the 
devil to say, “‘ These indicate what a miserable 
and worthless creature you are”? It is not 
so that God judges. He takes us at our 
best and highest and sweetest, and inter- 
prets us by the poetry and the music of 
love into the body of Christ. Sometimes 
ideality is taken as the ultimate fact; not 
what we are, but what we are meant to be, 


4 THE EPISTLE TO 


and what we will be by the grace and love 
of God and the energy of His Spirit, must 
be regarded as the fact if we would be just 
to the kingdom of God. 

Think, therefore, of the Church as the 
continued Christ. Do not look wildly round 
and ask where the Christ of nineteen centuries 
is; do not say, ‘‘ Lo, He will come in this form 
or in that form, from this place or from that 
place.” The apostolic conception authorises 
us to say that Jesus Christ is here, and is 
made visible in His Church, and that He 
regards the Church not in its actual or tran- 
sitory condition, but in its idealistic meaning, 
its final completeness, its heavenly music. 
We know that at present it is in many 
respects a poor Church; but God sees some- 
thing within the poverty, and beyond the 
poverty; and, recognising that something, 
Jesus Christ is already satisfied with the 
travail of His soul. Blessed be God for the 
telescope! the great spiritual instrument that 
enables us to see through the clouds and 
beyond the stars to the finished heavens 
where the morning star burns for ever. 

A beautiful word we also find in chapter ii. 


THE EPHESIANS 5 


5—the word “grace.” ‘ By grace ye are 
saved’; “the riches of his grace” (verse 7). 
What does “ grace”’ mean? Is it too much 
to say that not one man in fifty really knows 
the meaning of the word “grace,” except in 
some narrow and superficial dictionary sense P 
Theword “grace” is the Gospel in one syllable ; 
the word “ grace ’—beautiful as a dewdrop, 
perfect as a star—holds within it all God’s 
eternity, all God’s redeeming purpose. If we 
could explain the word “grace” we should 
drive off much irreligion and recover much 
lost ground, and establish in confidence many 
a weary and divided mind. I know the word 
is a Bible word; that is not enough. We 
are sure the word “ grace”’ can be found in the 
New Testament ; that is far from enough— 
in fact, that amounts to next to nothing. 
The word “grace”’ is not only to be found in 
the Holy Book; it is to be found in human 
life, in human intercourse, in the family, in 
the market-place—everywhere. It is grace 
that triumphs over law. How far could this 
be explained to the slowest and darkest mind ? 
If it could be explained, the explanation 
would be a revelation. We must not keep 


6 THE EPISTLE TO 


within theological limitations if we are to 
explain such a word, so that the most plebeian 
mind can catch the light of its fire; we must. 
go into common places, into the resorts of 
men, and even into the household life of the 
people. Would God they could see it! “By 
grace ye are saved”; not by law, not by 
works, but by pure favour, love, condescen- 
sion, pity, and divine help. But how can 
it be made clear to the people who do not 
want to have it clarified—to the English 
heathen? Let me suppose that you have 
forfeited the confidence of an employer, a 
father, a friend, a state. You do not deny 
the forfeiture of the confidence. You reply, 
‘“T am unable to make any such denial; I 
have done the things I ought not to have 
done.”” Have you broken the commandments ? 
Yes. Have you been dishonest? I have. 
Do you wish to be restored? I do. Will 
law ever restore you? Never; law has done 
with me, the law has condemned me, the law 
has marked me with its black stigma—black 
as the soot of hell. Then what is to be done ? 
I have no idea what is to be done; I know 
that I have done the things that I ought not 


THE EPHESIANS 7 


to have done, there is no health in me; I dare 
not open the Book of the law, it would be 
like opening a great furnace door and letting 
the scorching fire out upon my very face. 
The thing to be done is this: as your pastor, 
teacher, or friend, I will go with you, and 
we will see the employer or friend whose 
confidence you have forfeited. That is the 
only way. We go to him and say, ‘* Wrong 
has been done to you, a grievous wrong ; 
we have no defence, we have no explanation, 
but the offender is broken-hearted about it— 
he falls down before you and begs you to 
forgive him and restore him; he has no 
defence; we say that again and again with 
the utmost emphasis and clearness; I have 
come with him to say this for him, for he 
is so choked with grief he can hardly say 
it for himself”; now let me say to you, “ Be 
Godlike, and on the basis of the man’s 
repentance forgive him—on the basis of his 
broken-hearted penitence give him another 
chance. What is your answer? Never has 
man so grand an opportunity as when he 
has an opportunity of forgiving some other 
man on the basis of penitence.” And the 


8 THE EPISTLE TO 


employer or friend feels the pathos of the 
occasion, acknowledges that there is no appeal 
to the law—the law is cast iron, absolutely 
inflexible—and says, “On that ground I 
cannot look at this offender; but if he is 
broken-hearted and penitent, who am I that 
I should stand out against him? One day I 
may have need of forgiveness myself; in the 
name of God I forgive thee, and ask thee 
to re-establish thyself by faithful service.” 
What brought about that conclusion? Law ? 
Never: law could not do it. What, then, 
brought it about? Grace, free grace, nothing 
but grace. That is the Gospel case so far as 
some poor human parallel can dimly indicate 
it. That is the position in which we stand 
to the law. The law cannot accommodate 
itself; the law cannot feel; the law has no . 
compassionate heart. The law is definite, 
distinct, inflexible, final. But there is a 
higher power; there is grace, there is pity, 
there is condescending love. And so it is 
with the Gospel of Christ; and we shall 
one day come back to the sweet, sweet old 
hymn, ‘“ Free grace and dying love.” That 
is the Gospel; other gospel there is none 


THE EPHESIANS 9 


that is effective to the salvation of the soul. 
What wonder, therefore, that the Apostle 
Paul seemed to make a special jewel of the 
word “ grace,” and to wear it as the crown 
star on his grateful heart ? 

A wonderful expression occurs in chapter 
ii. 7—“ that in the ages to come.” What a 
grip of things these men had! They are 
not occupied with frivolous subjects, with 
current topics, with the anecdote of the day; 
they see far, they have insight as well as 
foresight, and they measure the divine move- 
ment by ages as well as by moments. This 
is the only true measurement of the con- 
ception of the kingdom of heaven. This is 
the only conception of a nation’s develop- 
ment and progress; not what it is at one 
particular moment or under one special set 
of circumstances, but what it is in its 
diameter, in its circumference, in the accre- 
tions and traditions of a thousand years. 
Jesus Christ, therefore, is in a sense waiting ; 
He is looking for the restoration of things, 
and working towards it. We must not in- 
terrupt divine processes; a semicolon is not 
a fullstop ; the literature of God is written 


10 THE EPISTLE TO 


by the hand of God, and He must punctuate 
His own poetry. Let us, therefore, not be 
impatient, and thus show our ignorance. 
Do not let us rush in with explanations, 
and thus show our imperfectness and im- 
maturity of mind. This Gospel belongs to 
ages—ages past, ages to come; stretching 
from the unbeginning beginning to the end- 
less end. 

What a beautiful expression is in chapter 
ii. 16—“‘ reconcile.” What does “ reconcile” 
mean? Bringing things that were at vari- 
ance into union; bringing voices that were 
out of tune into perfect accord; bringing 
hearts that were mutually hostile into a 
common understanding. How can this re- 
conciliation— accepting it as a Bible word— 
be brought about P Only by grace. Recon- 
ciliations that are based on compromise 
are very temporary conveniences-—there is 
nothing in them. It is not enough to say, 
“Let it be dropped, let the quarrel cease, say 
nothing more about the enmity.” You have 
not extinguished the enmity when you have 
given it an opiate and plunged it into 
a narcotic sleep. Reconciliation must be 


THE EPHESIANS 11 


fundamental; it must go through and 
through the very heart, tissue, and substance 
of things; and it is by Christ that we have 
received the reconciliation. 

A wondrous word is in chapter ili, 3— 
“revelation.”” We now call it “ discovery.” 
In the old, old time men called it ‘ revela- 

_tion.” When the old prophets saw the inner 
meaning of things they said, ‘‘' Thus saith the 
Lord’; and that is as true in geometry as 
it is in theology. Do not let us be atheistic 
in mathematics, and partially pious when 
we are singing hymns. If you can establish 
as an axiom any mathematical truth you 
would be perfectly justified in saying, ‘“‘ Thus 
saith the Lord.” You could call it “a dis- 
covery,” and give no social offence; or you 
could call it ‘‘a revelation,” and be set down 
as a fanatic. Choose your own word. The 
Apostle Paul never scrupled to use the word 
“revelation.” It implies that God trained 
his vision to bear a certain light ; it therefore 
implies that a certain light was granted to 
the Apostle at a definite time, and it also 
promises to the whole redeemed Church of 
Christ continual growth in the knowledge 


12 THE EPISTLE TO 


of Christ as well as in His grace. We ought 
not to be shocked when we hear that a man 
of prayer—of deepest, highest, truest faith— 
has had a revelation from God. Why should 
it be thought a thing incredible indeed 
that God should speak to those who sleep 
on the soft bosom of His love? If we had 
greater expectations we should have greater 
realisations ; we have only lost the revelation 
because we have lost the child-heart. 
Notice how wonderfully the Apostle keeps 
almost throughout the whole epistle to the 
house idea—to the family conception. Hence 
we have such words as “household,” “ the 
whole family in heaven and in earth”— 
husbands, wives, parents, children, servants. 
This Gospel goes through the whole house, 
omitting not a single chamber, creating a 
right atmosphere, and bringing all things 
into a harmony too deep for explanation, too» 
grand for verbal discussion. You cannot 
be hanging little mottoes round the house 
to teach one another how good you ought 
to be to somebody else. This can only 
be done—this great mystery of reconcilia- 
tion—by all being rooted in Christ, by all 


THE EPHESIANS 13 


drawing the living water from the same 
living fountain; and then there will be no 
need of explanations and concessions and 
compromises, and sighings about what I 
have to bear and what I have to endure. 
If you talk so, join the atheists; we do 
not want you at the table of the Lord. 
They who are really in Christ Jesus do not 
arrange a household life of compromise; 
they fall into each other’s arms and hearts 
and ways by a mysterious, by a divine 
sympathy and trust. 

The Apostle has a special word in chapter 
vi. 9—“ Neither is there respect of persons 
with Him”; that is, with God or Christ, 
or, as He is called in the text, ‘“‘ the Master.” 
But there must be respect of persons with 
God. But he says there is no respect of 
persons with God. Neither is there. But 
how can these statements both be right? 
Easily. What does the word “person” 
mean here? Have you traced the meaning 
of the word ‘person’ through the New 
Testament Greek? Have you the shadow 
of an idea as to what “‘ person ’”’ means in this 
particular relation? The word “person” is a 


14 THE EPISTLE TO 


common word in the New Testament. God 
loves some persons. Yes. Therefore He does 
not love some other persons. Quite right. 
But it is said He is no respecter of persons. 
Perfectly so. The word “ person” isa peculiar 
word in Paul and in James, and perhaps in 
other places. Persona, as we should say 
in modern times—a persona grata. My lord, 
what is that? Next to nothing. What then 
does “‘ person”? mean in this particular text ? 
Mask. The Lord is no respecter of masks. 
There is a personality of mere estate, fortune, 
position, environment ; the Lord cares nothing 
for such persons. There is a personality of 
soul, character, mind, the inner selfhood ; 
there God distinguishes between the right 
and the wrong, between the good and the 
bad, between those who know Him and those 
who know Him not. We are living in an 
outside age, we have enlarged the shop 
window; and the Lord cares nothing for 
your masks, vizors, shells; He wants to 
know about the kernel, the soul, the charac- 
ter; that is the man. Outside selves soon 
fall away. It is with nations as it is with 
men. When the individual man becomes a 


THE EPHESIANS 15 


mere mask there will be found nothing in 
him at the last. When a nation becomes a 
mere mask it will lose all its battles, and 
IT am glad of it. When a nation gives up 
its Bible-reading it gives up its soldiering 
as well. You cannot have soldiers where 
the national discipline is neglected or im- 
perfect ; your soldiers will be no better than 
your nations. Of course, now and again we 
shall all be delighted because a few soldiers 
have got on the top of a little hill; that 
ascent of a cock to a barren dunghill will 
be telegraphed all over, and will amount to 
nothing. It would be amusing, if it were 
not tragical and heartrending, to see how 
greatly excited we are because somebody has 
got to the top of the stairs and found nobody 
else on the landing. When the nation loses 
its Bible, it loses its fighting power. You 
cannot reject God, and be good fighters. 
People who are Bible-reading and psalm- 
singing will pound the atheistic nation to 
dust. They will be laughed at as snuffling, 
fanatical. Cromwells; but Cromwell did not 
lose much. When you lose God you lose 
your generals. When you have scorned the 


16 THE EPISTLE TO 


marriage bond, and marry for convenience, 
for social purposes of a minor nature—when 
the sacred household altar is turned into a 
mere stool of penitence—the nation has gone 
down. When the highest parts of any capital 
—its most wealthy, educated, and supposedly 
refined parts, sections, and neighbourhoods— 
have gone down in moral character; when 
in the middle of such society there is nothing 
but a bed of lust; the nation has gone 
down, and all its battles will end in smoke, 
disappointment, and disorder. Families and 
nations are only finally kept together by 
discipline, by love of work, by service, by 
early rising, by self-denial, by trust in God, 
by sevenfold daily prayer. You can try the 
other policy if you will, and God will find His 
vindication in the history of His own world. 
Men cannot lose religion without losing a 
great deal more. No man can give up Bible- 
reading and all that Bible-reading implies 
and necessitates without robbing somebody, 
or dishonouring somebody, or falsifying some 
sacred trust. You cannot take the keystone 
out of the bridge and leave the bridge as 
strong as it was before. And now some 


THE EPHESIANS dt; 


fanatical idlers have proposed that we should 
have a day of humiliation and prayer. No! 
We do not want a day of humiliation and 
prayer; we want a life of humiliation and 
prayer. This is not an opportunity for occa- 
sional piety, for the fasting that eats more 
than ever, for the humiliation that loses 
nothing of its pride. These are occasions 
for life-long fasting, penance, discipline, 
companionship with Christ, and identification 
with the spirit of the Cross, 


CHAPTER II 


WOULD like to read to you in the 

second chapter of Paul’s Epistle to 
the Ephesians. Would you like to hear 
the reading? We must stop now and 
then to modernise and apply the deep, 
sweet meaning. 


The Apostle Paul is not always just the 
same. He is consistent, but never mono- 
tonous. He is a sevenfold man; his epistles 
are his truest photograph. Have you ever 
read the epistles in the light of that sugges- 
tion ?>—not only to find out what the epistles 
are, but what their author was. He never 
wearies us, because he has a great gift of 
escaping monotony. He is rugged, incohe- 
rent, sometimes almost verbally self-contra- 
dictory ; he is full of parentheses, he makes 


great use of bracketings and asides and 
18 


EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 19 


literary diversions, yet all the while there 
is a wholeness which eyes that love him 
can perfectly discern. In some epistles he 
is argumentative, almost contentious; he 
is pushing a point upon the attention of 
his correspondents, and he wants to establish 
a plea. He is not so enjoyable in such 
epistles. He sometimes elicits pity for the 
other man. He is heroic in his logic and 
destructive in his conclusions ; then I some- 
times prefer to turn over a page. To the 
Colossians, the Ephesians, he is as it were 
in another sense more vividly and tenderly 
and approachably the Apostle of the grace 
of God. In the Galatians he talks to the 
Galatians; in the Corinthians he talks to 
the Corinthians; they have their local dis- 
putes and matters to adjust and to determine. 
But to the Ephesians and the Colossians he 
speaks universals, he reveals solar systems; 
his strides are constellations; they are infi- 
nitely wondrous in intellectual conception, in 
imaginative and ideal colour and emphasis— 
catholic epistles in very deed; addressed 
to one church, but meant for all men and 
all ages. 


20 THE EPISTLE TO 


We need such epistles many a time in tra- 
versing the hills and the dales of life. There 
are times when we are impatient with special 
messages to special people, with letters of 
explanation and contention; we want some- 
thing more—we feel as if we could receive 
all the sunshine and breathe all the air 
and accommodate all the sparkling, flashing 
fountains of living water. When we are in 
such spiritual mood, we find all we want in 
the great father-mother-brother-sister letters 
to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. It 
would be the soul’s fortune in the sterling 
gold of heaven if our memories could charge 
themselves with all the philosophy, theology, 
and poetry of the two epistles to the Colos- 
sians and to the Ephesians. They are great 
banqueting-tables; if we change the figure, 
they are great highland scenes with wondrous 
panoramas of light and colour and mystery 
and consolation. There are, I repeat, times 
when we need every word of them—times 
when we need the whole Godhead; for we 
are poor, alone, sad, and lost, and God Him- 
self is hardly enough to satisfy the creature 
He has created. Who knows the epistles 


THE EPHESIANS 21 


to the Ephesians and the Colossians? He 
who knows them has bread to eat that the 
world knows not of. Yet these very 
epistles, so deep in their theology, so 
wide in their outlook, so piercing in their 
appeals, are full of ethical teaching and 
moral reminiscence and penetrating rebuke. 
Paul preached a full-orbed Gospel; he 
went around the entire circle of divine 
thought in so far as it is revealed to 
human imagination. 
Take the first verse as an example: 


“And you hath He quickened, who were dead 
in trespasses and sins.” 


That verse is theology in one sentence: 
you need no more. As we found in Gen. i. 1 
all the Bible, so we find in Eph. ii. 1 
the whole scheme of God and the whole 
revelation of human history. You—dead, 
quickened; you—alive, brought from the 
dead. There are moral resurrections as well 
as physical. How we boggle over some poor 
little miracle in bodily resurrection, and for- 
get the infinitely grander and greater miracle 
of spiritual resurrection—the awakening 


22 THE EPISTLE TO 


of the soul, the calling back of strange 
thoughts, whispering into the ear of moral 
death, blowing some silver trumpet over 
the grave of conscience, and awakening ~ 
conscience to newness of life. But it is 
the trick of man to worry himself over the 
lowest points of things, to make a great 
stir about minor quantities and subsidiary 
agencies and applications; it is the nature 
of the creature when he is left to himself. 
He is greatly excited about the coming again 
of a poor body that is not worth while 
bringing back from the dust, but he passes 
over in silence the bringing back of a dead 
soul, the quickening of an inspired conscience, 
the reconstruction of a moral temple: that 
he cares not for. He says, “ With what 
body will the dead come?” Poor worrying 
creature! always wasting himself at the 
wrong points and waiting midnight after 
midnight at the wrong door. If God has 
quickened man, He will see to all the rest. 
Recall our lessons upon words that teach 
by implication. We have seen that created 
means provided; that provided means re- 
deemed; that redeemed means ultimate 


THE EPHESIANS 23 


sanctification and perfectness of manhood. 
So with the word “quickened”; it carries 
all the other evolution along with it; the 
oak is in the acorn. 


Verse 2: “ Wherein in time past ye walked accord- 
ing to the course of this world, according to the 
prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now 
worketh in the children of disobedience.” 


There is the world for you in one gloomy 
sentence. This is Paul’s reading of moral 
history. Paul was no fancy lecturer; Paul 
did not write out a course of dreams and 
call them a course of lectures: Paul recog- 
nised that the air is full of the devil. The 
devil has hardly left room for the summer 
in all that air which he breathes and poisons. 
He would edge out the summer if he could; 
he tempts the spring; he says to that sweet 
young thing, the vernal spirit, Blight, O 
blossoms! Arise, O East Wind, and kill 
the buds! choke those little birds in their 
homely nest! It is the devil. Do not 
attempt to argue him out of existence. 
Some people try to argue him into exist- 
ence; they have a devil on paper and in 


2A, THE EPISTLE TO . 


the middle of a sealed creed which they feel 
themselves to be at liberty to take into the 
Court of Chancery to have the deed gram- 
matically interpreted by a man who is learned 
in the analysis of letters. But the Apostle 
Paul assumed the devil, revealed him, de- 
clared him, took him into account, lectured 
upon him, defied him, sometimes was rebuffed 
by him—* Satan hath hindered us.” There 
is probably no way of getting the idea so 
thoroughly into our dense minds as by repre- 
senting the air, the whole atmosphere, as in 
some mysterious and inexplicable sense the 
sphere of the devil’s ministry. You can for 
yourselves see what difficulty the sun has 
with the atmosphere, the fog, the rain, the 
east wind, the sea tormented, the crops 
blighted, the fields naked when they should 
be clothed with verdure. All this is but 
for a time. Never undervalue the enemy ; 
never underestimate his resources; take it 
for granted that, whether you are fighting 
spiritually or physically, you have a great 
enemy to meet, and prepare yourselves ac- 
cordingly, or you will lose the battle, and 
you will deserve to lose it. 


THE HPHESIANS 25 


Verse 3: “Among whom also we all had our 
conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, 
fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; 
and were by nature the children of wrath, even as 
others.” 


That is not modern talk. We have schooled 
ourselves by false schooling out of these great, 
solemn, bedrock verities. The Apostle never 
would have suffered for our poor superficial 
theories; the Apostle would not have endured 
suffering and gloried in tribulation because 
he had received into his fancy some cobweb 
theory of creation, its evolution and its destiny. 
Not for such things did men preach in sorrow 
and seal in blood. If we have little con- 
ceptions about man and God, we shall have 
a little crumbling church, always at war with 
itself, and always losing the sham fights 
which it challenges and invites. Marvellous 
master was Paul! What deftness! what 
magnanimity! what wondrous subtlety of 
persuasiveness! “We all had our conversa- 
tion.” This is no pedantic priest coming with 
ferrule or rod to scourge some minor genera- 
tion of men; this is a brother soul, this is a 
kindred experience: I know it, I have suffered 


\ 
i 


ri 


~ 


3 a THE EPISTLE TO 


it, I recall the darkness, I remember the 
mercy. It is preaching of Paul’s kind that 
will reconstruct the Church. The Church of 
Christ does not need reform. We have chosen 
that little milk-and-water word, and we carry 
it about with us as a kind of evening-party 


trick or toy. We say, This or That must be 


reformed. Jesus Christ never said so; He 
did not like diluted terms; He never spake 
a pale hesitant language into which you could 
thrust a thousand qualifying parentheses. He 
said, Repent! ye must be born again: make 
the tree good; do not paint the branches— 
hew down to the root and get the poison out. 
We do not want a reformed Church: we 
want a regenerated Church, a reconstructed 
‘Church, a Church of the Holy Ghost; not 
a framework, scaffolding, or apparatus of 
our own hired ecclesiastical imagination ; 
we want a regenerated Church, every fibre, 
every filament made pure, made chaste with 
the sanctity of God. Beware of these little 
church-jobbers who are going about reform- 
ing any institution. When an institution 
needs reforming it needs destroying, that 
destruction may precede reconstruction; and 


THE EPHESIANS 27 


that sense of inadequacy or unfaithfulness 
may lead to a cry for the baptism of 
regeneration. 


Verses 4-6: “ But God, who is rich in mercy, for 
His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we 
were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with 
Christ, (by grace ye are saved ;) and hath raised us 
up together, and made us sit together in heavenly 
places in Christ Jesus.” 


“Us,” “us,” always “us ’—a priest who 
invokes a benediction upon himself as well 
as his people. That is brotherhood, that 
is holy masonry. “God, who is rich in 
mercy ’—not rich in thunderbolts only, not 
rich in lightnings and tempests and great 
whirlwinds. Mercy is the greater part of 
Him: if we could but see it, His wrath is 
sometimes an aspect of His mercy; He slays 
the sinner that He may save him; He strips 
me naked that He may clothe me with a 
finer linen; He tears my nest to pieces that 
He may show me how to find a larger and 
warmer in some tree I had never thought 
of. “Rich in mercy,” so that we may go 
to Him at all times, and we see Him most 
when we cannot see Him at all because 


28 THE EPISTLE TO 


of the burning tears of our unquenchable 
grief. Put God’s mercy to the test; He 
can bear a greater pressure still; lean hard, 
harder, hardest, again; you cannot fatigue 
Omnipotence. It was “when we were dead 
in sins” that God showed the richness of 
His mercy. It wes not when we were partly 
recovering ourselves; it was actually when 
we were dead in sins, and, being dead, 
helpless, lost; it was then that the Sun of 
Righteousness arose with healing in His 
wings. God makes us now sit in heavenly 
places—that is, in the heavenlies, in the 
world above the world, in the unseen king- 
dom. We trust the naked eye, and therefore 
miss the grand astronomy. We call our eyes 
of the body instruments of vision: whereas 
they are only instruments of deception or 
misinterpretation. True seeing is of the soul. 
Every son of man is in heaven while he is 
on the earth. This is a great mystery, but 
I speak concerning Christ and His Church. 
They who go about with a made candle 
lighted by a made match will sometimes 
come into passages where the swirling wind 
will blow the lighted tallow out. What 


THE EPHESIANS 29 


then? Live in the eternal, live in the 
heavenlies; have a throne spiritual, a crown 
imperishable, beauteously called “a crown 
of life.’ © man, why be but a little higher 
than the brutes when thou mightest be but 
a little lower than the angels? 


Verses 7,8: “That in the ages to come He might 
show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kind- 
ness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace 
are ye saved through faith; and that not of your- 
selves; it is the gift of God.” 


Salvation is not by intellect, knowledge— 
because then heaven would be full, if full 
at all, of grammarians. I question whether 
any grammarian can enter the kingdom of 
heaven. I am now speaking of him in his 
purely pedantic relationship. He must be 
more than a grammarian: a grammarian he 
may be, and a great grammarian, and a 
grammarian of whom his fellows are justly 
proud; but in relation to the kingdom of 
heaven he must be something other, greater, 
wiser—he must have a faculty within a 
faculty that can see Jesus Christ as a little 
child might see Him. If salvation were not 
as the Apostle has placed it here, it would be 


30 THE EPISTLE TO 


an intellectual feat, perhaps sometimes degrad- 
ing itself into an intellectual trick. But it 
is of grace—‘‘ by grace are ye saved through 
faith.” The world never invented these two 
great words; the world does not understand 
either of them. “ Grace,” ‘‘ faith ”—that is a 
foreign tongue. It is! it is heaven’s tongue; 
it is the tongue of the Infinite Love. Grace 
means favour, pleasure, kindness, pure simple 
love, appreciation ; it is a gift, not a bargain ; 
it has no equivalent; the number stands 
alone, and the sign of equal-to never follows 
it. It is above algebra, above grammar. 


Verse 9: “Not of works, lest any man should 
boast.” 


That is the very point. There must be no 
boasting ; we must simply stand out and say, 
It is the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in our 
eyes. ‘‘ Not by works of righteousness which 
we have done, but according to His mercy 
hath He saved us, by the washing of re- 
generation, and the renewing of the Holy 
Ghost.” We have nothing to do with our 
own making. We have nothing to do with 
our physical birth; we have nothing to do 


THE EPHESIANS 31 


with our superior or spiritual birth. For the 
next verse says: 


Verse 10: “ For we are His workmanship, created 
in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath 
before ordained that we should walk in them.” 

Into what beautiful English might this be 
rendered! Instead of saying “workmanship ”’ 
speak the word that is almost Greek in its 
very form—‘“ we are God’s poems.” God is 
the Poet—we are the poems; He makes us 
now in this measure, now in that measure; 
now sublime, now more friendly and ap- 
proachable, but always pregnant with thought 
and love and music and mercy. Our souls, 
like our bodies, are all dissimilar, yet each 
soul is the poem of God. How so, Master— 
how so? Through Christ Jesus, in Christ 
Jesus, by the power of Jesus: the mystery 
of the Cross. Man, if thou knowest not these 
things in thy soul, and only through some 
worm-eaten book of man’s writing, thou canst 
not discuss this high theme, thou art not in 
this great encounter with evil. Thou art 
an outsider, ill-fed, ill-nourished, self-exiled. 
Come in, and learn the language of the house, 
the home! 


52 THE EPISTLE TO 


Verse 11: ‘Wherefore remember, that ye being 
in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called 
Uncircumcision by that which is called the Cir- 
cumcision in the flesh made by hands,” 


Paul is now in the midst of one of his 
characteristically tumultuous sentences. He 
will come out of it all right; we must give 
him time. Observe how urgent he is that 
people should get a full view of things; how 
specially anxious he always is that students 
of the Christian revelation should not be 
occupied by isolated phases and aspects, but 
should get a whole view of Christ’s purpose 
in addressing Himself to man’s condition. 
Hence the Apostle says, “‘ Wherefore remem- 
ber”; do not let yesterday escape without 
record, or the long yesterday of the heathenish 
state, but recall it, interrogate it, consider 
exactly what it is and what is its relation to 
your present condition and to the total idea of 
the kingdom of God! Do not let us think 
in detached days; do not let us break up the 
great calendar of life into the little calendar 
which is called a diary. History is a unity; 
individual history is an integrity, complete 
in itself in a certain well-understood sense. 


THE EPHESIANS 30 


“Wherefore remember”: bring yesterday 
to help to-day; bring yourselves as you 
were a quarter of a century ago to interpret 
your present sacrament of eating and drink- 
ing; keep yourselves well together, focus the 
mind, do not be led away by an anecdote, 
but be instructed and illumined by a philo- 
sophy. There is a right remembrance, and 
there is a memory which is tormenting, and 
which Jesus Christ gives us no permission 
to cherish. We must therefore distinguish 
between these acts of memory. We may so 
remember the past as to be consolidated in 
our faith and greatly cheered in our Christian 
progress and spiritual development; or we 
may be so affected by the past as to be utterly 
depressed and disheartened, and be led to say, 
by some seductive spirit, that it is no use 
trying any more, for, batter on the kingdom 
of heaven as we may, there is a door through 
which our appeal cannot be heard. That is 
fa degraded memory ; that is a false and mis- 
chievous remembrance. The great memory 
of the past is this, “‘ Where sin abounded 
grace did much more abound.” You are not 
to stop by the little muddled pool of your 

3 


84 THE EPISTLE TO 


own sinfulness, but get away to the sea of 
the infinite love. Thus keep memory in its 
right place, have it always near at hand so 
as to call it when needful, but have it so 
thoroughly under control that memory itself 
shall never become a spiritual temptation. 
Do not carry about your dead self as a burden, 
but catch some shadow of it that may be 
useful in chastening the right moment and 
in discouraging you from trusting too much 
to your own good works and your own 
self-righteousness. 

You were ‘ called Uncircumeision by that 
which is called the Circumcision in the flesh 
made by hands.” You had a nickname. 
The Christian sects are fond of nicknaming 
one another. Sometimes they seem to have 
nothing else to do; they think it is an 
increase of their own piety to question the 
piety of other people. They insist that 
everybody shall do exactly as they do, or 
they cannot be within the divine circle. So 
the Gentiles were called Uncircumcision; 
the knife had never cut them; they were 
outside the pale. Whereas those who taunted 
the Gentiles so were only circumcised in the 


THE EPHESIANS 35 


flesh, cut in the body that is made for the 
tomb—a poor circumcision, a cutting that 
never touched the heart. So the Apostle 
comes to the aid of those who have been 
suffering from religious banter and mockery 
and spite and contempt. He would say, in 
effect, ‘‘ Never mind; they do call you the 
Uncircumcision, but they themselves are not 
really circumcised. That is the true circum- 
cision which touches the heart, which brings 
the scalpel or the penetrating knife to bear 
upon the motive and the conscience and the 
soul; he is a Jew who is one inwardly.” So 
we must expect sometimes to be the subjects 
of banter and mockery. It is a great pity 
that persons should make little banners to 
wave over their own heads, as if they were 
elect and chosen to the exclusion of everybody 
else. There is a circumcision made by hands ; 
there is a poor evaporating baptism of water, 
a miserable trick; there is a circumcision 
made with a spiritual knife; there is a 
baptism made by fire of the Holy Ghost, 
that never evaporates, and it proves itself 
by the fervour of the character, the noble- 
ness of the manhood. 


36 THE EPISTLE TO 


Verse 12: “That at that time ye were without 
Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, 
and strangers from the covenants of promise, having 

no hope, and without God in the world.” 
Remember that condition. The story of 
heathenism has its part in our own spiritual 
or Christian education. There was a time 
when we were without Christ: did we put 
ourselves into Christ? Never. How then 
did we come to be in Christ? ‘“ We love 
Him because He first loved us.” Does the 
branch put itself into the vine? It either 
grows out of the vine or it is grafted into 
the vine by the husbandman who knows the 
culture of the vine and can treat it accord- 
ingly. “Not of works,” as we have read 
in verse 9, “lest any man should boast.” No 
branch should say, ‘“‘ I put myself into Christ, 
I inserted myself into the Vine and caught 
the holy wine of its living juice, and there- 
fore I am as good as any other of the 
branches.” All the vine must say, “ We are 
of Christ”; all the branches must say, ‘‘ We 
grow in Christ and out of Christ and by 
Christ, and from beginning to end it is all 
Christ.” “Not of works, lest any man 
should boast,” pointing to his own little 


THE EPHESIANS 37 


circumcisions and his own little miserable 
arrangements, conjectures, and guesses ; 
his own clever intellectual inventions and 
theories, which will be scorched by the sun 
-and vanish in smoke. “ Aliens from the com- 
monwealth of Israel’: literally, Alienated 
from the commonwealth of Israel; not aliens 
in the sense of never being in it or never 
being intended to be in it—worthless little 
loose things that had no connection with the 
universe, the mere rubbish of creation. That 
is not the meaning, but, being alienated ; 
as it were, self-alienated, self-expatriated 
from the dear summer country in which God 
meant us to live and to bear fruit; being 
alienated, seduced, self-expelled ; always in- 
cluded in the love and the purpose of God, 
but self-excluded by reason of our falling 
to the tempter when he seduced our souls. 
There are souls that are outside the kingdom 
of heaven; they have no right to be there, 
because they are souls in the Biblical sense 
of that term—they ought to be inside the 
circle of the redeemed and the blessed. They 
are outside, they are alienated; but inasmuch 
as they are men, we go out after them in 


38 THE EPISTLE TO 


the name and in the power of the divine 
grace, and say, *‘ Come in ; there is redemption 
wrought for you ; come, come because you are 
men, come because you are men redeemed— 
come!” Let the missionary, the evangelist, 
the holy, truly ordained propagandist go out 
and say to those who are alienated and far off 
and counted contemptible by the superficial 
Circumcision, ‘‘Come in. God waits for 
you, God has saved you; the worst first, 
come!’ When the Gospel loses that tone of 
welcome and of hospitality, it has ceased to 
be a gospel: it is like a withered leaf blown 
by the chill autumnal wind. What is the 
case of most persons who are outside? They 
are without Christ, and they have no hope, 
and they are without God in the world. 
They live, and yet do not live; they have 
a name to live, and are yet dead; they are 
not in the churches, they are but too willing 
to blame the churches. We may be unjust 
even to churches. It is for the churches 
to fall back upon the awful process of self- 
examination and pass the tribulum that they 
may see what they are when they are torn 
to pieces as it were by iron teeth. We are 


THE EPHESIANS 39 


~ not always to accept the verdict of those 
who are outside upon those who are according 
to their lights doing their best inside. For 
my own part, I belong to all the denomi- 
nations. I would not belong to any one 
denomination, because it does not give me 
room enough. I want the sky, not the 
ceiling; I want the whole firmament of the 
divine purpose, and not some little academic 
or sectarian construction of the divine purpose 
in creating and redeeming the world. There- 
fore, belonging to all denominations in the 
spirit of charity and appreciation, believing 
that no one denomination is the total Church, 
I can see good in all the communions, and 
I see good where I strongly differ in opinion. 
But what is opinion? where did it come 
from ? who has any exclusive freehold rights 
in opinion? We may be one in a great 
purpose, united in a sublime loyalty. We 
are of different politics, but we are of the 
same patriotism. So in the Church of Christ 
we have all these differences and conflicts, 
and yet sometimes, blessed be God! there 
are summer mornings so bright that we can 
see through all the conflict and acknowledge 


40 THE EPISTLE TO 


that the spirit of the living Christ is in every 
true heart, and that some people are of the 
Christian disposition who have not yet groped 
their way to the acceptance of the Christian 
dogma. Charity is the best critic; love is a 
judge that seldom errs. Let us therefore look 
upon those who are outside in a philanthropic 
spirit, and show them that we value them ; 
they are not lost on the turnpikes of time, 
but they are sought out, inquired for, and 
earnestly yearned over by the spirit of re- 
deeming love. That would give us a new 
interest in missions, home and foreign. There 
are those delightful English people so broad- 
minded that they would let the heathen 
alone. Where did these delightful, large- 
minded Christians come from ? From heathen- 
dom; there was a time when their ancestors 
painted themselves blue, and did not wear 
any clothes worth mentioning, and were not 
indisposed to eat one another when circum- 
stances seemed to point in the direction of 
that kind of gruesome festival. Yet these 
people who have come from heathenism 
gather their fur cloaks around them, and 
say that perhaps it would be just as well 


THE EPHESIANS 41 


to let the heathen alone. Persons who talk 
so never saw Christ, never felt the power of 
His love, have absolutely nothing whatever 
to do with Christ; and when they touch the 
cup of His blood they bring their blasphemy 
to a culmination. 


Verse 13: “But now in Christ Jesus ye who 
sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood 
of Christ.” 


Verse 11, ‘‘ Wherefore remember” ; verse 18, 
* But now.” ‘The influence of the past upon 
the present, the uses of history as giving 
a foil to present privileges and delights and 
ineffable joys. We should not enjoy the 
banquet so much if we did not remember 
the days of hunger. There was a time when 
we had no food, when we had no home, when 
we were alienated from the commonwealth— 
vagrants, outcasts, nomads—having nothing 
to eat but what we took by thievery. ‘ But 
now”! Who could value the gift of sight, 
the man who has always had it, or the man 
whose eyes have just been opened ? and, as 
Sydney Smith says, the first thing the blind 
man saw was his Creator—all sights in one. 


42 THE EPISTLE TO 


And we who have had our bodily sight all 
this time have never seen the Creator at all. 
Remember these musical words used by the 
Apostle, “But now.” How different to-day ! 
but now the summer warmth is round about 
us, but now the sea has ceased to trouble, 
and has become a uniting force binding 
nation to nation. ‘Ye who sometimes were 
far off.” What a picture this is of distance; 
what an idea it is to bring the fact of distance 
as a spiritual illustration and indeed an inter- 
pretation given to the heart which the heart 
can hardly resist! Now we who were far 
off—on the other shore, in the unmeasured 
wilderness, having no ideas, sympathies, 
aspirations of a noble, pure, charitable, and 
divine quality. “But now”! There is a 
tone of suddenness in the exclamation. In 
a certain sense conversion must always be 
sudden: we see what we never saw before. 
In a certain sense every sunrise is a novelty: 
the sun can never be anticipated. We say 
in our ignorance, looking on a landscape 
dimly, through some murky atmosphere, ‘‘ We 
can imagine what this landscape will be 
when the sun is onit.”” No! light can never 


THE EPHESIANS 43 


be imagined ; we imagine some poor aspect 
or degree of it, but light is a daily surprise— 
light looked at with wise eyes is a continual 
miracle. We have seen the noonday light; 
aye, but there is a light above the brightness 
of the sun. No painters have imagined 
that. They have painted the driven snow 
and given some idea of white light on the 
canvas; but the mystery is beyond the brush, 
that any light can be above the brightness 
of the sun—God’s symbol to us down here of 
what He is if we could but see Him through 
the meaning of the symbolism. You are 
poor interpreters of nature if you are not 
symbolical, if you are mere literalists; 
everything should have a meaning to you, 
and it is in the meaning that the thing is 
defensible, if defensible at all. Why, the 
very livery of the servant is a symbol; it 
may mean what the servant never dreamed 
it meant; every colour, every thread, every 
button may have a symbolical meaning. 
Certainly all nature is a grand parable; the 
lily has not been itself in all its virgin 
whiteness until it has lifted you out of 
your despair and made you pray to Him 


dt. THE EPISTLE TO 


who made the lily fairer than the robe of 
Solomon. 

Weare “ made nigh by the blood of Christ.” 
Many persons have a great objection to the 
word “blood,” and I have a great objection 
to those persons. If we take out the blood of 
Christ we leave the New Testament without 
a theme and without a purpose. There are 
those who cannot see the symbolical aspect 
of the blood. To them blood is but red fiuid 
that flows through living veins of man or 
bird or dog. Blood is life; blood is love; 
blood is the reality and spiritual meaning 
of things; blood is the Gospel. Do not be 
frightened by those persons who only take 
the common and degraded interpretation of 
the word “blood.” They are not worthy of 
a place in your house, much less worthy of 
a place in your confidence. They will 
degrade everything. They can hear nothing 
in the nightingale, they can see nothing in 
the rose. Religion is only a mantle to them— 
not an angel, not a spirit, not a symbol. 
When we get back to the right conception 
of the Atonement of Christ we shall get 
back the Church, we shall get back the 


THE EPHESIANS | AD 


Resurrection, and we shall recover, so to say, 
the Holy Ghost; and Christ’s Church shall 
no longer be one of the institutions—she will 
rule all the institutions. How poor is the 
conception that anybody can rule the Church 
except the Church herself, in obedience to 
the daily inspiration of her living Lord! 
Rule the Church? Rule the dawn! Go to 
the hills and say when the sun must come; 
stop him until you are ready to receive 
him. Go to the sea and say, “ Back! a 
higher than Canute commands thee. Back, 
thou encroaching flood!’’ Go and do that, 
and then come, ye poor stipendiary, or non- 
paid magistrates, and tell God’s Church what 
she is to do. She isa living soul—she lives 
with her Lord, she confers with Him every 
moment; and, instead of the State ruling the 
Church, the Church must rule, sanctify, 
ennoble, and inspire the State. 

Verse 14: “For He is our peace, who made 
both one, and brake down the middle wall of 
partition.” 

Jesus Christ is a breaker-down, and Jesus 
Christ is alsoa builder-up. The literal render- 
ing of this ‘‘ middle wall of partition” would 


46 THE EPISTLE TO 


amount to some such word as “hedge.” There 
has been a hedge between one garden and 
another, and that hedge has meant indi- 
viduality and separation and exclusiveness. 
Jesus Christ comes and, so to say, eradicates 
the hedge; that is, takes it up by the roots, 
ploughs under the roots, and casts the roots 
up, where the sun can smite them unto death. 
It is the business of Christ to unite men. 
He does not find out the points of their 
differences and magnify them; He finds out 
the points of union, and He magnifies those 
points, and He says to contending men, 
“Whatever may be the little anecdote or 
incident you are fighting about, you are both 
men. I see the image of God in both of 
you; go back into the innermost sanctuary 
of the meaning of humanity, and cease your 
little fray.” He is the Hope of nations; 
He will bring mankind into brotherhood. 
Nothing but the Gospel of Christ can destroy 
alienation and separation and bitterness, and 
bring contending forces to understand that 
the sword never did anything really beneficial 
and permanent, unless its action was fol- 
lowed up by another mode of life and a 


THE EPHESIANS A] 


higher and diviner conception of the purpose 
of being. 


Verses 15-17: “ Having abolished in His flesh the 
enmity, even the law of commandments contained 
in ordinances; that He might create in Himself 
of the twain one new man, so making peace; 
and might reconcile them both in one body unto 
God through the cross, having slain the enmity 
thereby: and He came and preached peace to 
you that were far off, and peace to them that were 
nigh.” 


That is His great work in the world—to 
slay, yet to heal; to slay the enmity, that 
He may build up the friendship. The devil 
must be fought; only one Soldier can fight 
him, and that one Soldier is the Captain of 
- our salvation. Forth, thou Son of God, and 
slay Apollyon, the evil spirit that is cruel 
to the hearts of men! Jesus Christ will 
accomplish this warfare; Jesus Christ 
will drive out all things evil. The process 
is long, the process is even severe, often 
rising to an agony of pain and often darken- 
ing the soul as with a heavy cloud of despair ; 
but the process goes on, and it will emerge 
in One being enthroned King of kings and 
Lord of lords. 


48 THE EPISTLE TO 


Verse 18: “ For through Him we both have access 
by one Spirit unto the Father.” 


We all pray in the same spirit; we may 
use different words: what of that? You can 
pray better in one way and I can pray better 
in another way, but there is no prayer outside 
Christ ; it is the name of Christ that makes 
our petition effectual. Prayer is the mystery 
of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Any prayer 
without an appeal to Him or an appeal to God 
for His sake falls back like a bird lightning- 
struck. The humblest prayer, sanctified by 
His name and made vital by His blood, finds 
its way through all difficulties and infirmities 
of grammar and composition into the ear of 
the Father, and, as it were, brings back its 
own answer, as if a bird had been sent from 
paradise with some branchlet in its mouth to 
say that the Father is well pleased. 


Verses 19-22 : “So then ye are no more strangers 
and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the 
saints, and of the household of God, being built upon 
the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ 
Jesus Himself being the chief corner-stone ; in whom 
each several building, fitly framed together, groweth 
into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also 
are builded together for a habitation of God in the 
Spirit.” 


THE EPHESIANS 49 


What conceptions, what intellectual virility, 
what a noble outlook, what a grasp of things | 
There are no little-minded Christians ; if they 
be Christians growing in Christ, they are 
erowing towards perfectness of knowledge 
and completeness of character. And as for 
the Apostle’s mixed metaphors, they would 
kill our poor little withering reputation ; 
but he handles them all as a master might 
do. Here is citizenship, and temple-building, 
and growing, and reintroduction into the tree, 
the vine. A building, a growth, a citizenship 
—a wondrous masonry. Each mind will take 
out of the metaphor exactly its own meaning, 
and will be just to every other meaning. Re- 
member, the Apostle Paul never refers to any- 
thing as dead and finished. If it is a temple, 
it is growing, it is being built up into some 
completer significance: and if it is a citizen- 
ship, it is a citizenship built on the central 
idea of household or home. And you who 
care for Citizen Sunday, care for home Sunday, 
be right in your own house, among your own 

children, and out of that will come all that 
is best in citizenship. 


CHAPTER III 


Verses 1-4: “For this cause I Paul, the prisoner 
of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, if ye have heard of 
the dispensation of the grace of God which is given 
me to you-ward: how that by revelation He made 
known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in 
few words, whereby, when ye read, ye may understand 
my knowledge in the mystery of Christ).” 

ri AUL was more a talker than a writer. 
We have in many instances illustrations 

of his sometimes rough and incoherent method, 
the rapid action, the tumultuous action, of his 
most energetic and motion-like mind; and we 
must not judge him by the little carpenter’s 
rules of rhetoric and continuity which we 
ourselves have fashioned and marked in 
plain figures. It takes a Paul to under- 
stand a Paul, but here and there we can 
come squarely down upon his meaning, and, 
touching him thus broadly and sympatheti- 
cally, we can, when he is away from us, trust 


him to come back again in due time and to 
50 


EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 51 


bring with him odours of the Paradise beyond 
the morning. 

It is natural to inquire into a man’s cre- 
dentials. Paul sometimes offers apparently 
a species of that most disastrous of all written 
instruments, a testimonial. At other times 
he says, in effect, “‘ We have no written testi- 
monials; we have the people, those who have 
believed our words, the saints who have grown 
in grace and in the beauty of holiness; they 
are our testimonials.” 

In the first verse of the third chapter Paul 
presents a testimonial of his own; he says, 
** Behold the baton, the mace, the thin leafy 
gold, the mitre, the crosier, the certificate 
with the broad seal upon it stamped with 
diverse effigies and omens.” That would not 
be the New Testament reading; all these 
words I could find in some part of the English 
language, but not in Paul’s epistles. In 
what guise, then, does he come? A “ pri- 
soner.” We chain Paul to our pulpits a 
prisoner. Paul was a prisoner of the Lord— 
a prisoner for the sake of the Gospel. His 
gospel got him into a prison, mine has got 
me into a palace. There is a suspicious 


52 THE EPISTLE TO 


evolution. We ought to smite ourselves 
with many a question regarding the kind of 
evolution through which we have personally 
and officially passed. Paul is in prison, but 
his apostleship is free. He says, “‘ My environ- 
ment is not altogether inviting to those who 
are looking out for poetry and beauty and 
garden glory; I ama prisoner, I am chained 
to another man, and I have to take my step 
from his step; but, Gentiles, I am your 
Apostle, designated as your missionary—I 
am coming.” It is one of two things with 
a man’s human relations: either he will 
crush them or they will crush him. You 
may know a man’s quality by the way in 
which he handles what is pompously called 
“his environment.” The Apostle Paul made 
no apologies. He did not see the little 
limited creature which bore his own name; 
he saw the great Apostles, the archangels of 
the earth—the Apostles of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. ‘ But,” said he, “I have another 
testimonial, beyond the fact of my being a 
prisoner of Jesus Christ; I have a ‘dis- 
pensation of the grace of God which is 
given me to you-ward’: I long to read 


THE EPHESIANS 53 


my certificate to you, I have some deep 
things I want to tell you the very moment 
I come into your society; I have realised 
a special stewardship.” ‘“‘My gospel’ is a 
phrase I am not afraid of,’ Paul said in 
effect. Every man has his own gospel, his 
own God, his own conception of the universe ; 
‘these entitle him to speak. Within their 
own limits, Paul had his text and sermon 
and testimony and revelation, and the whole 
apparatus of a divinely consecrated ministry, 
and he said, “I long to be with you; I have 
no time to smooth my words into rhythm, 
I want to beat out this love into thunder- 
tones, that all the Gentiles over all the sea 
may hear the music of the divine love.” Did 
you discover all this yourself, Paul? ‘‘ Nay,” 
said he, “have you not heard that ‘by 
revelation He made known unto me the 
mystery’?” It is a favourite word of the 
Apostle’s—the mystery, the hidden mystery, 
the secret enwrapped sevenfold; but I see 
it, feel it, it imparts its own throb to my 
often fainting heart, and then I am strong 
with the strength of giants. This is the 
secret of a powerful ministry: suffering, the 


54 THE EPISTLE TO 


grace of God, a special dispensation, a revela- 
tion, God making known to the heart of man 
what is in His own heart. We can do much 
in the schools, but we cannot communicate 
the mystery of God. There are some things 
which are to be learned only by experience, 
especially by suffering, by disappointment, 
by burying in a great cemetery ten thousand 
dead trusts, once beautiful flowers that we 
wore on the heart, and from which we re- 
ceived what we thought was heavenly odour ; 
yet one by one we have had to surrender 
them, and the cemetery is full of dead hopes 
and withered ambitions. When such a man 
speaks to us we should not be mindful of 
his manner or his mere method; we should 
let him talk to us in his own way, and if 
now and then we can pick up a diamond or 
a pearl and have some right to it because 
of our appreciating love, then truly shall we 
be edified by the Apostle of the Cross. 


Verses 5,6: “ Which in other ages was not made 
known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed 
unto His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit ; 
that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the 
same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by 
the gospel.” 


THE EPHESIANS 55 


We must not judge other ages by our 
own. We live in a great noonday; the sun 
would seem to be at the zenith, as if he 
were giving us every beam contained in 
his horn of light. How prone we are to go 
back far away into the paths of history and 
to judge men by our own standard of 
morality! Thus we make havoc of the Old 
Testament; we do not live ourselves back to 
the standpoint of those whom we criticise. 
We must not take down our electric lamp, 
and judge the little tinder spark that was 
the only spark possible centuries ago. Our 
Christianity has taught us but a poor lesson 
if it has only taught us to hold in contempt 
the men who laid the foundations of history. 
Know the refined man by his not remarking 
on the vulgarity of other people. Know the 
true saint of God who, reading the early 
stories of the Bible, can yet see the plasm 
or beginning of God’s final idea of conduct, 
character, spiritual personality. Yet even 
in the Old Testament we have men as great 
as Paul. True, they were only exceptional 
cases, but they shrink from no comparison of 
stature, from no standard of quality; they 


56 THE EPISTLE TO 


are not men who need to apologise when 
their names are mentioned; they saw the 
morning afar off, they caught the white 
light ere it shone upon the night-clouded 
hills. At the same time there were others 
in violent contrast to the prophets and 
minstrels of the Church, elect, ordained, 
and crowned of God for special ministry 
and trusteeship in spiritual dispensations. 
Even such contrastive characters we must 
judge as net having had all the privileges 
and benedictions which have almost nauseated 
our age to the point of satiety. We may 
have too many privileges: if we cannot 
digest them and assimilate them, they are 
but burdens to us. We shall either be 
lifted up or crushed down by the privileges, 
the honours, and the benedictions which we 
are given to enjoy. Let every man hear 
this in the innermost chamber of his heart. 
Privileges are not given to us to stand 
outside us; they are given to us for assimi- 
lation—growth—and then how can we have 
too many of them, when by the grace of 
God we turn them all into spiritual strength 
—into sublime and beneficent character? 


THE EPHESIANS 57 


Revelation is progressive. We think we 
are far advanced, we call this noonday ; 
centuries hence we may call up these poor 
grey days, and speak of them as the com- 
paratively dark ages of the soul. We have 
often been taught that we cannot imagine 
light; it is easier to imagine darkness than to 
imagine glory. The sun has a way of kissing 
every little weed and every small, frail, 
trembling leaf into significance and almost 
personality. A great engraver is the sun; 
he plants the image of God on a grass-blade 
or works it into a dewdrop. What we do 
in regard to the old Scriptures we must 
do in regard to many venerable characters ; 
we must remember in their case, too, that 
they had not our privileges. Yet amongst 
the characters of the olden centuries there 
are men who would put us to blushing 
shame. They lived with God, so to say; 
it was sometimes hard to distinguish which 
was the man and which the supphant and 
which the saint; there was a curious in- 
working and interworking of agency and 
ministry and experience and consciousness, 
until the men themselves became living 


58 THE EPISTLE TO 


mysteries, not to be read by the publie eye, 
but only to be understood by an indescribable 
and incommunicable masonry of soul, so that 
hand clasped hand and passed the password 
without the opening of lips. 

Verse 7: “ Whereof I was made a minister, accord- 
ing to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by 
the effectual working of His power.” 

That is the true education of the ministry. 
It does not exclude other education, but 
all other education must of necessity be 
secondary, auxiliary, co-operative. The great 
education is the education of the soul, the 
implanting in the soul of “the gift of the 
grace of God.” What does it mean? No 
man can tell you in words; every man can 
feel it in power. What is it that makes 
the poet? No man can tell; the poetry is 
its own revelation, and this is probably the 
only explanation we shall ever get. When 
we hear the true poetry we seem always to 
have heard it; it does not startle us by its 
originality so much as remind us that some- 
where, on the shore of some great sea, 
under the shadow of some great temple 
forest, we have heard these wondrous tones 


THE EPHESIANS 59 


and notes before. The true poetry belongs 
to every soul, as the light belongs to every 
child. It is to us that the Gospel must 
manifest, expound, and vindicate itself. But 
not in vocables ; the Gospel is not some trick 
in grammar, it is not some expert way of 
shuffling the rules of syntax and prosody ; 
it is an inner experience, within another 
experience, refined and sublimed into an 
inexplicable consciousness of the nearness 
and the power of God, the sweetness of the 
love of the Cross. 


Verses 8-12: “Unto me, who am less than the 
least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should 
preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of 
Christ ; and to make all men see what is the fellow- 
ship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the 
world hath been hid in God, who created all things 
by Jesus Christ: to the intent that now unto the 
principalities and powers in heavenly places might be 
known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, 
according to the eternal purpose which He purposed 
in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness 
and access with confidence by the faith of Him.” 


Was this some false pride on the part of 
the Apostle? By no means. How, then, 
is he thrown into this minority of quality; 
how, then, is he put down the very lowest 


60 THE EPISTLE TO 


on the list? Because of the marvellous 
view which for the moment he has had of 
the unsearchable riches of grace, the fellow- 
ship of the mystery which from the beginning 
of the world hath been hid in God. The 
Apostle saw such wondrous things outside 
of him and beyond him that he himself 
shrank into nothingness. The candle is a 
very useful little light, but it will not even 
mention its own name when the sun bursts 
upon it in his great glory; if we could 
hear the candle, it would say, * Put me out, 
take me away; in the eye of that glory I 
perish!” So Paul oftentimes got such great 
and overpowering views of the grace, the 
mystery, the love, the future, that he was 
less than the least; he shed his individuality 
and became as the nothing of nothingness 
because of the ineffable revelation which 
extinguished our poor little mornings and 
our frail, transitory, struggling summers. 
Woe to the man who is greater than his 
text! woe to any preacher who is not 
abased and humbled and destroyed in the 
presence of the Cross he preaches! When 
the Apostle compared himself with other 


THE EPHESIANS 61 


men he used no such language as this; he 
was head of them all, he was not a whit 
behind the chiefest of the Apostles. But 
then he was walking upon a purely human 
plane; in the passage before us he is walk- 
ing upon a plane that seems to run right 
through the very noontide of heaven’s own 
glory; hence his self-depreciation. And 
this will be the experience of every man 
who is living, moving, and having his being 
in God. We must get away from the world 
of anecdote and circumstance and petty 
conception; we must sail the _ shoreless 
oceans; we must bathe in the infinite glory 
of heaven’s own vision of light. 


Verse 13: “ Wherefore I desire that ye faint not 
at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.” 


You must and will by and by get the 
right view of tribulations. “Shall I tell 
you where I am by the grace of God?” 
said Paul. Why, by the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ we glory in tribulations also; 
we have taken up crowns of thorns and 
pressed them into our heads, until by the 
succour of our blood they have blossomed 


62 THE EPISTLE TO 


into coronals. You may touch a tribulation 
too lightly. Like the nettle, it will sting 
timidity; you may grasp it and defy its 
poison. There are times in Christian ex- 
perience when we talk about our tribula- 
tions and our great distresses and our 
intolerable misery ; and all such threnody is 
perfectly right up to the moment of its 
being wailed in the circling wind. And 
we will talk about these same experiences 
more and more, and as we talk about them 
the grace of God will fill in all the spaces 
and create a new energy, and exercise a 
new distributive influence amid all the 
actions and energies of the life. Then, 
when we speak about our tribulations a 
third time, a certain note will drop out of 
our voice and another note will come into 
the voice, and we shall be able in the long 
run to say, “Tribulation! we glory in it; 
our loss is gain, our grief is a sacrament of 
love, a seal of election.” 

Now the Apostle utters one of his grand 
prayers: 


Verses 14-21: “For this cause I bow my knees 
unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom 


THE EPHESIANS 63 


the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that 
He would grant you, according to the riches of His 
glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in 
the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts 
by faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 
may be able to comprehend with all saints what is 
the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; and 
to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, 
that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. 
Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly 
above all that we ask or think, according to the power 
that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the church 
by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without 
end. Amen.” 

Oh, what an outpouring of the river of 
love and grace and faith from the heart of 
this chained prisoner! His body may be in 
durance vile, but his soul is on wings. 
He passes from this dark environment into 
the very temple and sanctuary of divine 
grace, and pours out one of those grand 
prayers that stand absolutely unrivalled in 
the liturgies of the Church. How tender is 
thisman! He shames almost the tenderness 
of John; he was in all respects a greater 
man than John. He was a man of immense 
intellectual capacity, intense spiritual fervour, 
great mental tenacity, and power of con- 
tinuity—gifted with that singular power of 


penetration that bores the rocks and the 


64 THE EPISTLE TO 


mountains, and carries the highway of God 
through their darkest places. Yet did ever 
man bring such lovely fragrant flowers to 
lay upon the altar of the Church? This is 
the man who wrote the poem of love; this 
is the man who said to the Philippians, “I 
have you in my heart.” A sevenfold man 
was Paul; he will probably be the mystery 
of the Church “until the day break, and 
the shadows flee away.” He is sometimes 
so simple that he sends a message to the 
man and the woman in the little house, and 
has a word for the little child, and delivers 
by the hands of his helpers all sorts of 
blessings and salutations to people unknown 
to fame, but known to Paul; and Paul could 
give fame—to have one’s name spoken by 
Paul would be renown. He was never 
ashamed of any man, woman, or child who 
had helped him; he never forgot a name; 
he carried names from city to city, and sent 
them back again, as it were, on wings of 
love, touched as with a father’s fingers of 
benediction and holy sealing. These are the 
great men who have blessed the ages—the 
men who have sent up to heaven for country 


THE EPHESIANS 65 


and home and Church these great noble 
prayers that have taken the kingdom of 
heaven with violence. There is no per- 
sonality so utterly contemptible as the man 
who edges himself into the Church for the 
purpose of pronouncing upon prayer, who 
has never fathomed the meaning of such 
sublime heart-risings and holy aspirations 
and benevolent desires as those which cha- 
racterise the great prayers of the greatest 
heart that Christ has ever captured by His 
spear. Enter the sanctuary of such prayers, 
and do not answer the caviller, but despise 
him. He knows not the tongue of this land; 
its grammar is an unknown music to him. 
The man who could breathe such prayers 
will confirm his own saintliness by his death. 
A man of this quality is never killed mid- 
way; there is too much of him to perish by 
the roadside; he must fulfil his course, 
fight the fight out to the end. It was all 
in the prayer—in its vastness, its depth, its 
tender saintliness. He who can see into 
the true quality of that prayer can see 
gleaming beyond it a crown of life. Blessed 
be God for the man who desired for us to 
5 


66 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 


know that which cannot be known—to know 
the love that passeth knowledge! Such 
paradoxes are part of the divine revelation. 
To know that we cannot know may be the 
beginning of knowledge. To know that 
which passeth knowledge is to have a great 
possession—yea, an inexhaustible and im- 
perishable inheritance. 


CHAPTER IV 


Verse 1: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, 
beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation 
wherewith ye are called.” 


HAVE already written that I, Paul, am 

the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you 
Gentiles; I must repeat the fact. There 
are some experiences that burn themselves 
into our souls, so that repetition becomes a 
natural necessity. I lay before you no 
printed letters, no sealed certificates, no 
proud but worthless pedigrees; for I, too, 
have a pedigree, or had until I burned it. 
I come before you with a chain, with a 
stigma, a brand ; and if that does not impress 
you, no amount of sealed parchment would 
worthily beget your confidence or your 
admiration. I am a poor prisoner, another 
man keeps the key of the gaol—I am on the 
inside of the gloomy door; but, though a 

67 


a 


68 THE EPISTLE TO 


prisoner, I invite you to freedom—to an ever- 
widening franchise in the kingdom of light— 
and I send to you all the available tokens of 
love. Remember that you are called “men” ; 
you are not toys of man’s making—you are 
twice over the creation of God. There is a 
great voice in you; it calls you to liberty 
and service, to patience and hope. Every 
Christian soul is called; he is not in the 
kingdom of God at his own bidding—he has 
accepted an invitation, he banquets at the 
Lord’s table by right of electing grace. Let 
no man whisper in your ear one solitary word 
that would lead you to contract or to under- 
value your sublime and imperishable vocation. 
Men, you are answering a cry, you are re- 
sponding to a voice; hear it, and spring 
forward with the alacrity of spontaneous 
and obedient love. 
How was this to be done? The Apostle 
answers thus: 
Verses 2, 3: “ With all lowliness and meekness, 
with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; 


endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the 
bond of peace.” 


Do not chide one another, do not seek to 


THE EPHESIANS 69 


prove your earnestness by rebuking the 
languor of souls that are not equal in 
vitality to your own. We cannot all walk 
at the same pace; stop for the slow man— 
for the soul that would be quicker if it 
could—and show that you have entered into 
the gentleness and patience of Christ by wait- 
ing until infirmity has had time to gather 
itself together. ‘‘ Forbearing one another 
in love.” We are wondrously one, yet more 
wondrously, for the time being at least, more 
than one—multitudinous, innumerable; all 
the human fractions being required to make 
up the total integer of God’s image and God’s 
purpose in creation and in redemption. There 
is not a word here about mastery, domination, 
superiority, or even flaunting, ambitious, and 
insane energy. The words are of a different 
temperature; they would not hurt a little 
child in the nursery, they might soothe 
affliction in its hottest pain, they might 
encourage those who have no confidence in 
themselves. The words are like beautiful 
pearls, and pearls must ever stand alone in 
gracious solitude; not needing a companion, 
yet wanting all the other pearls to make 


70 THE EPISTLE TO 


up some circlet of grace, some sign of inner- 
most beauty. These are the pearls of God: 
lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbear- 
ance, love. What precious stones are in the 
casket of God! Surely we might come in 
somewhere and say, “Lord of the casket, 
may this pearl be mine, or that, or yonder 
diamond that holds the glory of the morn- 
ing?” See how universal are all these 
attributes. There is nothing here of the 
nation, the parish, the mother tongue, the 
narrow locality: these words belong to all 
languages, and they grow in the sand and 
in the richest soil of Paradise—they belong 
to the music of the winds. Lowliness and 
meekness, and longsuffering and forbearance, ~ 
and everything done in the spirit of tender 
and sympathetic love. Paul says in effect, 
“Gentiles, this is the calling with which 
you are called”; God never addressed a 
more thrilling appeal to all the men of all 
the centuries. ‘“ Endeavouring to keep the 
unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” 
There is a spirit and there is a letter. Let 
Paul himself tell us how the case stands 
herein : 


THE EPHESIANS 71 


Verses 4-6: “There is one body, and one Spirit, 
even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; 
one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father 
a all, who is above all, and through all, and in you 

That is the true unity. One Faith, a 
thousand creeds. Man loves to make little 
creeds. Ever since man discovered the art 
of writing he has been trying in vain to 
thumbnail the revelation of God, and to 
carry it about with him as a kind of private 
property. Man will not recognise the differ- 
ence between faith, which is atmosphere or 
climate, and creed, which is to-day’s weather, 
showery or shiny as the case may be. Men will 
confuse weather with climate, and think that 
they must live up to the day, and have some 
umbrella creed to suit the day of rain, and 
some other adornment to suit the noonday 
of summer sunshine. Poor man! He must 
have tools; he sells tools in boxes; he is 
particularly fascinated by two-edged tools; 
he cuts himself, and thinks that the drawing 
of his own blood in small red spots will bring 
to him the sympathy of somebody surely, and 
that thus he will become an object of at least 
momentary and transient attention. There 


72 THE EPISTLE TO 


is one faith; it includes all the creeds, as 
the great astronomic movement carries with 
it the mountains and the valleys, the seas 
and the forests, and rolls them into one 
sphere of unity and beauty and gladness. 
“One body ’’—spiritual, mystical, imex- 
plicable; an experience without language ; 
an emotion that scorns even the help of 
music. ‘ One faith, one baptism.” But we 
have made little pools and puddles, and have 
dabbled ourselves and half washed ourselves 
in many a tank of the plumber’s making. 
That is not baptism. Why accept a little, 
narrow interpretation, when the great inter- 
pretation is offered to us in the love of God? 
“One baptism” of enthusiasm, inspiration, 
fire. But some people like to go about the 
world dripping and dropping more or less 
under the impression that they are baptized. 
No man is baptized that is not baptized with 
fire. “One God and Father of all.” One 
colour, though there are seven; but the seven 
make the one, and the one permits itself to 
be divided into the seven. The seven spirits 
of God become a great common inspiration 
in the history of mankind. ‘ One God,” not 


THE EPHESIANS 73 


the solitary God. Some people do not under- 
stand what the word “one” means; they 
think one is a stroke. But they do not know 
what a stroke is; a stroke may be a million 
points. There is no stroke—there is only a 
seeming unity of points; the microscope 
would divide your stroke into points, atoms, 
little isolated pieces of pencil or of chalk 
or of coloured ink. No man can define 
the word “one.” ‘There is no “one” until 
there is much more than one. One does 
not mean solitude, it means completeness, 
companionship, sphering out the first plasmic 
purpose. The tree is one, yet every acorn 
that hangs upon it is a Bashan in possi- 
bility. 

When we are more anxious about the 
faith than about the creed we shall have a 
real Church in the country. Oftentimes we 
have heard men pray, and we could not 
detect one controversial tone in all the holy 
adoration and petition; but the moment they 
have stood up to preach we have contradicted 
them, if not audibly, yet mentally; because 
preaching has latterly, in these few later 
centuries, become a sack of opinions, which 


74 THE EPISTLE TO 


a man, taking by the two bottom corners, 
shakes out in presence of the congregation, 
and supposes that he is preaching the Gospel. 
It is very sad, even to groaning and to the 
shedding of many hot tears! ‘One faith ”— 
not to be defined. Faith is never to be 
written down. You have a pocketful of 
creeds; you cannot put your faith in your 
pocket, nor can you write it, nor can you 
tell it; you can hint at it, you can breathe 
it, you can live in its holy and inspiring 
spirit. Faith is possible to a little child— 
trusting, clinging, depending, mute, looking 
up into the mother’s face. That is faith, and 
the angels have got no further on; they are 
still at the same monosyllable. It will take 
us eternity to spell it, and to pronounce it, 
and to realise it. All the Churches have 
faith in the decree that they are true. We 
express our faith in many ways. Some 
people must have a written faith—a faith 
which they can run into the dimensions of 
a placard. But that is not faith; it is only 
a creed, a symbol, an index. Faith never 
comes out of the soul to chatter the language 
of the day ; it abides in the heart—enlarging, 


THE EPHESIANS 75 


expanding, warming, uplifting, and gladden- 
ing the heart. The Roman Catholic and the 
Salvationist both live in faith, though they 
would fight twenty-four hours round by the 
clock every day if they had the unholy 
chance ; and the silent Quaker and the non- 
silent Methodist both have faith, but they 
have such different creeds, and such different 
pocket volumes which they carry about with 
them to prove that the other party is wrong! 
Why do we not get down to or up to a 
right conception of faith ?—the soul at its 
best, the soul in unspeakable delight and 
in unutterable confidence in the love of God. 
Emerson said that when Dr. Lyman Beecher 
got to heaven, and found Dr. Channing 
there, he would say, ‘‘Why, Channing, are 
you here?”? And Channing would answer, 
“Why, Beecher, are you here?” There is 
one faith, and until we realise the faith, 
rather than the creed, we shall have divisions 
and alienations and controversies, out of 
which livelihoods are made. 

In view of all this massive unity—one 
body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, 
one baptism, one God and Father of all—are 


76 THE EPISTLE TO 


we called upon to live in vague incoherence ? 

or has our very individuality an organic 

relation to the unspeakable Unity? Let 
Paul himself reply: 

Verses 7 and 11: “But unto every one of usis 

given grace according to the measure of the gift of 

Christ. And He gave some, apostles; and some, 


prophets ; and some, evangelists ; and some, pastors 
and teachers.” 


So we have diversity as well as unity; we 
have the seven colours in one white, and 
we have the one white spreading itself over 
the seven prismatic representations of its 
ineffable beauty. God never quenches indi- 
viduality ; He never magnifies unity at the 
expense of individual gift and responsibility. 
Though we are all one, yet we are in another 
sense one as if we were all, as if we repre- 
sented the race; we have in us more than 
belongs to our mere or narrow individuality. 
Having come up through millions of cen- 
turies, we have in us the dog and the tiger, 
the fish and the bird, with some streak of 
angelhood, and some mixture of music and 
poetry and light. Sometimes we are greater 
mysteries to ourselves than God is to our 


THE EPHESIANS 77 


souls. We are so many, so different; seven 
different men in one day—crawling with the 
beast in the dust, flying with the angel in 
the heavens. We have not, therefore, to run 
ourselves into some wild socialism; we must 
always realise the individual gift and the 
individual responsibility. The Apostle must 
not envy the prophet, the prophet must not 
contemn the evangelist, and the evangelist 
must not undervalue the pastor or the 
teacher. We belong to one another; every 
man has his own distinct calling of God. 
Why do we not recognise this? Why compare 
one man with another to the disadvantage 
of either? Who would go forth into the 
meadow and pluck a handful of grass-blades, 
and compare the one with the other, as if 
they were created by different creators? or 
who would take a tuft of grass and compare 
it with a bunch of grapes or a pound of 
apples? Why not recognise the poet, and 
make room for him? and why not ask the 
arithmetician to go sometimes and sit down 
by the side of the poet? and why not ask 
the singer and the speaker to hold festival 
together P and why admit into the banqueting 


78 THE EPISTLE TO 


hall, the commonwealth, by one low, narrow 
door? Why not recognise that we are all 
required to make up one manhood, and be 
thankful for each other’s gifts? To that 
are we called in Christ. 

For what purpose did Christ institute all 
these ministries in His Church? The Apostle 
tells us in the twelfth verse: 


“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of 
the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” 


You would think there are three things 
mentioned here, but there are not; the pune- 
tuation misleads us. After the word “ saints” 
is a little comma which interferes with the 
Apostle’s sense, and in fact destroys it. 
Obliterate the comma, and read the sentence 
thus: “For the perfecting of the saints for 
the work of the ministry”; getting the 
saints ready to minister; taking them in as 
apprentices, and turning them out journey- 
men. For the perfecting of the saints to 
do work, so that when they leave the 
process of education which is possible to 
them here and now, they may take with 
them a certificate for the perfecting of the 


THE EPHESIANS 79 


saints for the work of the ministry—getting 
them all ready to execute this sacred 
ministry. Why, it is like training a number 
of servants? Exactly; you have struck 
upon the image precisely. It is a training- 
house for servants? Yes! the perfecting of 
the saints for the work of the ministry. We 
teach painters and artists of many names; 
we distribute the professions. Let us look in, 
if you please, upon this man who is keep- 
ing a school for the training of musicians. 
How he explains the notes, their combina- 
tions, their different values; how he lectures 
upon the production of the voice, and does 
it in a voice which shows that he has never 
studied the art himself; and how he puts 
all these unhappy pupils through divers 
exercises, himself being happy in the degree 
in which he makes them unhappy; and we 
say to him—if we dare speak to such a man— 
“What are you training these young souls 
for?” ‘For the ministry of music, for the 
perfecting of the pupils for the platform, 
for the orchestra, for public execution, and 
for the charming and delighting of public 
audiences.” That is the meaning of the 


80 THE EPISTLE TO 


Apostle, in so far as a spiritual analogy 
can accommodate itself to one less spiritual. 
“For the perfecting of the saints for the 
work of the ministry”; for the training of 
the servants that they may do the Master’s 
work. It is like getting a ship ready in 
port. What are you doing to this ship? 
Getting it ready for the sea. You seem 
to be trying the timbers, and trying 
the iron, and trying the joints, and 
trying the masts, and to be making every 
possible criticism upon the whole pur- 
pose and construction. What is your idea 
in doing this? Getting the ship ready 
for sea, fully equipped, ready for the waves. 
And so Jesus Christ, in establishing all these 
orders of ministry, is seeking as His object 
the perfecting of the saints for service, train- 
ing every man to do some work, to do it 
well, to do it to the best of his ability, to 
do it without ever looking at the clock. 
Love has no clock. 


Verse 13: “ Till we all come ——” 


The immediate point is not what we are 
coming to, but the fact that we are coming, 


THE EPHESIANS 81 


and that something is coming to us, and 
that this double action is the secret of the 
inspiration, the culture, the strengthening 
of our innermost life. The text therefore 
is “till . . . until’—the something that 
says, You have not finished yet; there is 
another hill to climb, and then you will see 
it; there is another stream to ford, and on 
the other bank of that stream you will see 
what flowers can grow, and how mean are 
all the plants on this side the river. Till 
the sunshine comes, till the heavenly band 
appears and sends its thundering anthem 
through the quivering sky; till then hope 
on! You have not yet arrived, but you are 
proceeding, you are on the right road, and 
you have this little singing word to cheer 
you in all your climbing and in all your 
descending and in all your fighting and in 
all your sorrow “until—!” It would be a 
most profitable study to collate all the main 
passages in which we have the music of this 
“till and until,’ and we should rise from the 
perusal of the oracles satisfied that though 
we have yet much to do there is a climacteric 
point, there is a just-now-rising dawn, the 
6 


82 THE EPISTLE TO 


many tints of which can just be seen over 
the highest hill. Blessed are the prophets, 
forerunners who catch the first gleam of that 
morning light! They cannot keep the in- 
telligence to themselves; there are some 
gospels that must be preached. When a 
man who is out far beyond us sees the first 
rising of the light which the ages have been 
waiting for he will cry, “ Come! the day has ~ 
risen.” Even selfishness could not stifle that 
gospel, mayhap because selfishness could 
never receive it. The reason that people do 
not receive the Gospel is because they do 
not know it, nor do they feel it; it is at 
present but an intellectual conception or a 
moral conjecture; it is a mere study in ethics. 
When the Gospel itself, with all the heat of 
its own red blood, gets into any of us we must 
preach the Gospel to every creature. Let 
us be thankful for the men who have gone 
ahead—the men who first saw the morning. 
How long we have been waiting for it! It 
seems century after century as if the slum- 
berer would never awake; yet now and 
again, from Genesis to Revelation, there 
comes a voice which says, ‘ Until!” It may 


THE EPHESIANS 83 


be to-morrow, it may bea century hence—but 
it will come; and what we have to do is to hold 
on until the dayspring break in all its soft 
radiance and its implied eternities of summer 
on the earth that has been so long moaning, 
waiting, and mingling its prayers with a large 
share of dejection and despondency. 

The keyword, therefore, is “till” or 
“until”; the same word—the same idea— 
and that. idea one of encouragement and 
assurance, a word to hide in the heart and to 
listen to in the darkness when there seems to 
be no “‘until”—when there seems to be but 
one settled frown on the brow of time. Yet 
the custodians of God’s decrees—the divinely 
appointed priests of the eternal ark—are 
enabled to hear the sweet word “until”; and 
such men—unknown, mayhap despised—have 
kept the world alive. 

Where does this word “till” or “until” 
occur? Where all the great words occur, as 
I have told you a thousand times. Where 
do all the great words occur? In the Book 
of Genesis; and you have never read it! I 
speak not to the few who are familiar with 
the Divine Word, but to the many who never 


84 THE EPISTLE TO 


read it. You do not read the Divine Word 
when you only read it in the letter. The 
Divine Word is not a letter, but a spirit; it 
is not written music, but music sung and 
music brayed out from brass and throbbed 
as it were on living drums. We must go to 
Genesis for our first grand “ until” (chapter 
xlix. 10). Jacob is dying, he knows that his 
life is slowly but certainly trickling away; 
he calls all his sons around him, and makes 
such speeches as mortal man never made 
either before or since; and most of you have 
never read them! never was such eloquence 
heard before; there are no forged climaxes, 
no mechanically built periods, no half-for- 
gotten and hesitant recitations; but great, 
grand, flowing eloquence. When the patri- 
arch came to his son Judah he waxed almost 
as eloquent as when he came to his son 
Joseph, but not altogether as eloquent. The 
old man was at his best when his hands as 
it were groped for the head of Joseph, but 
he was beautiful when he spake to Judah— 
Judah who bore an awful scar of unfaith- 
fulness and badness, but which was much 
covered up, if not wholly healed, by processes 


THE EPHESIANS 85 


of grace which only experienced souls under- 
stand. Said Jacob, “The sceptre shall not 
depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from 
between his feet, until Shiloh come.” There 
is the “till” or the “until,” the word of 
promise, the gleam of hope, the pledged 
morning. No man can tell us what “Shiloh” 
. means; we have had the word in Hebrew 
and in Greek, and we have called around it a 
whole market-place of expositors, a whole 
gallery and Sanhedrim of learned men, but 
they can make nothing really final out con- 
cerning all the wells and fountains and 
springs that are hidden in this word Shiloh. 
But there is a Christian acceptation of the 
term which is sufficient for us. The ancient 
Jews, indeed, associated the name Messiah 
with the word Shiloh, and regarded them 
as practically interchangeable terms; but 
the ancient Jews did not know Messiah as 
we know Him; therefore we must attach 
a Christian interpretation to Shiloh, and find 
him in Bethlehem, and on Calvary, and on 
Olivet, and away yonder in the city of the 
temple of intercession. Enough for the pre- 
sent exposition that there was a promised 


‘ 


86 THE EPISTLE TO 


Man, soul, light, song, something away in 
the ages beckoning on the human race and 
feeding it with corn of heaven. You cannot 
empty the ages, you cannot deplete the 
future. The future itself seems to be a 
term of welcome and hospitality and most 
generous promise. We can look at it from 
any point of view we choose, and yet the 
human heart says, Your hope is in the 
future; to-morrow there may be One blessed 
among women who will give the world 
a Saviour, and you cannot shut out that 
“until”; you can modify it, mutilate it, 
pervert it—but there is the “until.” There 
shall be an evil reign until He come whose 
right it is to sit upon the uppermost throne. 
This song of faith also sings in each indi- 
vidual heart. It is to-morrow that Shiloh 
will be here, it is in a week or two that we 
shall hear from the far-away places that which 
will make us glad. Why, in one little month 
we shall hear tidings that will more than 
compensate us for all our sorrow and dis- 
may and self-accusation. In a century the 
world will grow greener grass and the heaven 
will be clothed with a diviner blue. In five 


THE EPHESIANS 87 


centuries who knows what the old earth will 
be? In a thousand years there may not be 
a grave in all the mould of the globe. It 
is because we have these great shining, sing- 
ing promises that we are able to suffer the 
present ; if this were all, we could not live 
another day. There are points of agony and 
of misery which would end our poor feeble 
existence if there were nothing beyond, if no 
Shiloh were preparing to come, if no sweet 
spring with vernal flowers were lingering by 
the blue Tyrrhenian sea. It is because we 
know that the Shiloh spring is coming that 
we can bear the darkness of these December 
days, which are hardly worthy to be called 
days at all. June and December could never 
talk about days, they would not understand 
one another; June has one lexicon and 
December another, which his dim _ eyes 
can hardly read. It is the Shiloh that is 
coming that keeps the world alive, and all 
the atheists and agnostics and scorners and 
mockers cannot keep out of view or out of 
the sphere of holy, happy influence this grand 
Shiloh idea. The child will be born, the man 
will grow, the king will ascend the throne, 


88 THE EPISTLE TO 


and then we shall know why the universe 
was created, and the explanation will be 
grand, solemn, sufficient. 

Another “until’’ we find in Psalm Ixxiii. 
17, “ Until I went into the sanctuary.” Then 
I saw all about it. The sanctuary is the only 
place where you can see everything, Church 
or State, just as it is. You see nothing 
really until you see it from the point of 
view of the altar. The religious soul—the 
soul that bathes itself in the stream of 
the divine wisdom and the divine light—is 
the greatest soul under heaven. All other 
souls are little pedlars compared with the 
religious soul that has the key of heayen— 
the entrée of the hospitable skies. A poor 
man was sadly troubled because wicked 
people were prospering exceedingly: their 
gardens were full of flowers, and they had 
roses with next to no thorns on them, and 
they had herbs and oliveyards and vineyards 
and all manner of increase, yet they never 
sang a psalm—they never laid a tribute on 
God’s altar. Their eyes were standing out 
with fatness, they had more than heart could 
wish; God was excluded from their whole 


THE EPHESIANS 89 


imagination; and yet as to banking—as we 
should modernly call it—and commerce and 
prosperity, they had it all; and poor Asaph 
was hardly strong enough to carry his own 
harp. When he saw these almost beasts— 
certainly these minus men—his feet well- 
nigh slipped, he was as nearly down flat on 
his back as ever a man was on treacherous 
ice. And then, having just strength enough 
- to crawl into the sanctuary, he said in effect, 
“What are all these lights? what is this I 
hear? what are these explanations that are 
rising in my mind ? who speaks ? who makes 
the night dead?” if there was any audible 
voice able to make him hear this music be- 
yond the merest outline and beginning But 
thought came on thought, reflection followed 
upon reflection ; Asaph put this together with 
that, and finally he said, “I see it! behold, 
it was they who were set in slippery places, 
it was they who were as bullocks fattening 
in a succulent pasture: aye, thou didst train 
them and fat them for the knife: I see it 
now!” We should see all things if we went 
into the sanctuary in their right proportion, 
because in their right perspective and their 


90 THE EPISTLE TO 


right light. We are so meddlesome, and we 
will discuss daily details, and we are first 
troubled by one man and then we are troubled 
by another, and then in the middle of the 
day there is a sure and certain lie that comes 
and perplexes us more than ever as to what 
we heard yesterday and heard this morning. 
Why can we not leave the detail alone? and 
why does every washerwoman suppose that 
she could settle better than any statesman 
what ought to have been done in certain 
great national crises? Only in the sanctuary 
can we get the solution of all things. Some- 
times that solution comes in the form of 
increased patience—a deepening sense of our 
dependence upon the living God. We do 
not always get an explanation in words and 
in grammatical phrases skilfully and me- 
chanically piled into paragraphs which we 
can measure and understand. It is not 
always so that God works. Somehow in the 
sanctuary there is an atmosphere, as there 
is in the chamber of death. Tell me what 
is that weird, wondrous atmosphere that gets 
around the soul in the sight of the dead 
body. You are then really in the sanctuary, 


THE EPHESIANS 91 


though not nominally so. The chamber of 
sickness may be a sanctuary; the chamber 
of your own closet, where you offer secret 
prayer to God and commune silently with 
the Spirit, may be the sanctuary. But in the 
ordinary signification of the term the sanc- 
tuary points to fellowship in worship, to a 
commonwealth of praise, to a common in- 
heritance of grace—a great mystery, no 
doubt, but known well to those to whom 
God has given keys and promises and a 
sure word of prophecy. It is the religious 
man who should govern the State; it is the 
Church that should rule the empire. We 
have inverted things, and have gone to the 
market-place to understand what can only 
be explained in the sanctuary. But the day 
is coming when the sanctuary—the holy, re- 
deemed, blood-bought Church of Christ—shall 
tell the world what to do. 


We might call on our way at the house 
of Canticles—the house of the love-dreams— 
and there in chapter ii. 17 we shall read, 
“Until the day break, and the shadows 
flee away.” That is a grand “until.” Is 


92 THE EPISTLE TO 


it possible that the sun can find his way 
through all the grey cold clouds of Decem- 
ber? Is there a day promised? Will the 
day break? Who ever heard the gates of 
the morning creak as they swung back on 
their golden hinges? Who ever heard a 
tramping army bringing up the sun as if 
by strength of muscle? Who ever heard 
the stars make a noise? Yet through all 
this wondrous ‘‘ process of the suns” there 
is a silent march, a silent incoming of the 
Messianic period, and when the day breaks 
upon the grave, the grave shall be as a 
cradle; and when the day breaks on sorrow 
and sickness, failure, disappointment, and 
manifold misery, we shall see the whole 
sphere of life in its proper colours, relations, 
and proportions, and find that God has been 
busy in the darkness. God does wonderful 
things in the night time; what He has done 
in the sanctuary of densest darkness we shall 
never know till the shadows flee away; then 
we shall find that all the while He has been 
building a palace for us—a right glorious 
and royal house—and making things ready 
for our souls away beyond the humble paths 


THE EPHESIANS 93 


of the stars which now we think a long way 
off, but we shall think them a longer way off 
still when we get above them and look down 
on them with a kind of gracious contempt 
for their twinkling and quivering lamps. 
Hope on! There is a word in the wintry 
air, a song in the wintry night—“ Until!” 


Paul’s idea of “until” was a coming to 
the measure of the stature of perfect men 
in Christ Jesus. ‘“ Perfect’ does not mean 
what it is often supposed to mean and what 
people get up more or less futile and senseless 
meetings for the purpose of promoting. There 
are no perfect. men in that narrow sense. 
There is probably no sin greater in its possible 
implications than sinlessness as it is narrowly 
and imperfectly understood. Not until resur- 
rection has done for the body what regenera- 
tion has done for the soul shall we know 
the meaning of “ perfect” in its moral and 
spiritual sense. Meanwhile, it may signify 
the culmination of a new period, the advance- 
ment, chapter after chapter, of a new book, 
promotion after promotion to school after 
school in the higher academies of creation ; 


94 THE EPISTLE TO 


it may mean as much as can be done here 
and now, but not perfection except as the 
end is the beginning of another period. The 
Bible ends, Revelation can only begin. Some- 
times we have heard our dear little children 
say that they have finished school. We 
know the sense in which those dear little 
hearts use the word “ school.” We can never 
get beyond the school of God, but we may 
go from class to class, from grade to grade, 
and at the conclusion of each grade we may 
say, “So much is perfect; that is done, but 
it is only done as a pedestal is done on 
which the statue is to stand, or is only 
perfect in the sense in which a field has 
been sowed with good seed which will come 
up thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold.” And so, 
as experience is multiplied by experience, 
and as consciousness is added to conscious- 
ness, we may seem at each particular crisis 
to be so far perfect. But the perfection is 
away beyond the sanctuary of the sun—away 
in the city which has no temple—because the 
whole city itself is but a temple: no paradox 
in words. We must die to see it, and we 
shall see no temple, because the whole heaven 


THE EPHESIANS 95 


is one vast radiant house of God. Brothers, 
let us cheer ourselves with this “till”? and 
“until.” Do not let us rush at hasty 
judgments; let us practise a religion of 
repose, let us exemplify the piety of rest. 
And when people ask us the vain question 
when shall we reach the last perfection, we 
shall say, ‘The hour is hidden with God, 
but the promise is that we are to wait until 
Shiloh come.’ 


Let us continue as far as possible the 
discourse which we began on ‘Thursday, 
studying the “Till” and the “ Until” of 
prophecy and providence and soul-sustaining 
promise. We swept over considerable space 
on Thursday ; there remains some ground yet 
to be traversed: the “till” and the “until” 
of time—the point that seems to go beyond 
time, to anticipate ages that are hardly yet 
reckonable within the four corners of the 
calendar of time. We could not live without 
the “ till” and the “ until” of the Divine Book. 
Sometimes the period is far off; sometimes 
it is to-morrow; yet we could not live 
without it, though it be ages away beyond 


96 THE EPISTLE TO 


the arithmetic of counted centuries. Nor 
could we live without that event which is 
going to take place in the to-morrow of 
imagination. “Day” seems to mean, if 
strictly limited to itself, despair, then suicide 
—then we see a light just on the mountain 
top; it may be but a candle-gleam, but it 
is a gleam; meanwhile, all light is poetry 
and liberty and strength. When naturalists 
have written all they have to write about 
the great mystery and action of light, they 
have only written a preface to a course of 
sermons. There are moral uses of light, 
poetries of light, paradises in every star-ray 
and in every blink of the sun. 


Let us add to our list of “ untils.” Ezekiel 
has a grand “until” or “till ”’—the words are 
the same in meaning. “Until He come ~ 
whose right it is”—to save, to reign, to 
direct, to take all the ribbons into His own 
hands and drive the chariot of the universe 
as He pleases. What a word. of cheer, 
solace, strengthening encouragement, and 
most blessed and inspiring assurance! There 


THE EPHESIANS 97 


is always One coming “ whose right itis.” He 
does not come in an apologetic attitude, with 
a compromise from some threatened power, 
with a proposition that this and that should 
be divided between light and darkness; He 
comes with right. Nothing is settled until 
it is settled rightly. Do not believe that hush 
is peace; do not believe in any peace that 
is not built on righteousness. Understand, 
however, the largeness of that word “ right- 
eousness”’; it is not my right, your right, 
the right of some third or unknown party, a 
selfish and limited right; it is a righteous- 
ness that involves the very nature and 
essence of the Deity. What is a crooked 
plumb line? Nothing, worse than nothing. 
What if we trifle with the joint of the square 
and give it a little tip to a hardly measur- 
able angle? Will it still bea square? No. 
You killed the square when you changed the 
angle. Geometry is sensitive; mathematics 
will not bear to be affronted; mathematics 
will have an avenging visitation upon those 
who trifle with rectitude. The arithmeticians 
say that figures—poor, plain figures—have 
affections. Who could have thought that 
7 


98 THE EPISTLE TO 


an arithmetician would have dreamed so 
deeply? He looks as if he himself were 
but a superficies, and sometimes he gets into 
such ecstasies as to speak about the passions 
of numbers and the affections of numbers; 
then he becomes religious, and builds what 
small altar he can with his brickdust. On 
what do the ages feed? On the promise 
that One is coming who will bring right 
with Him, and who will reign because He 
is right: who will sit upon a throne that 
cannot be torn down, because it fits into the 
whole scheme of things and is the part and 
the coronation of processes immeasurable 
and inconceivable. This will get rid of many 
paltry, petty, and insufficient teachings of 
compromise and balancing and settled cove- 
nantings and perfidious double commissions— 
taking alike from the buyer and the seller— 
and considering that all is going well because 
nobody knows anything about it. Nothing 
goes well that is in itself wrong. There is 
a tumbling day—a day of upset and ruin. 
“Be sure your sin will find you out!” 
thunders through the universe, and no man 
can cough it down. If we could get rid of 


THE EPHESIANS 99 


the notion that we have to handle and to settle 
things we should be greatly strengthened 
and greatly relieved. There is next to 
nothing that we have to handle. Some 
people can scarcely handle their own raiment; 
some persons need trainbearers to carry their 
poor skirts; and men are soon bereaved, 
stripped, and depleted of every high ambition 
and crafty cunning policy, and are left on 
the roadside with coronets that never ruled 
and with ambitions that were but decorated 
abortions. Those who live by faith live in 
peace ; they are perfectly sure that “ all things 
work together for good to them that love 
God”; and nobody loves God who does not 
love the right—who does not love righteous- 
ness—and who takes a little, narrow, paro- 
chial, selfish view of things. We are so soon 
overdone: we write fables and draw pictures 
about a man who tried to carry a globe on 
his shoulders. Why, it is but a poor bean— 
nay, it is but a poorer pea—which he carries, 
and not at all worth mentioning in any 
catalogue of the stars. We are tempted to 
-think that nearness is bigness, and we 
forget that there is One coming—coming 


100 THE EPISTLE TO 


with the clouds, coming with the morning, 
coming after the shortest day has had its 
little dark reign; coming, and coming 
to remain by force of right. I wish men 
would not tinker with things; that they 
would simply know their limitations; that 
they would go into the sanctuary of God, 
and sit there; and if they cannot speak they 
can be silent, and if they cannot sing they 
can speak, and if they can neither sing 
nor speak they can have wrought in them 
by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost the 
miracle of patience. Is it nothing to have 
had all these men about us who have said 
till,” ‘‘ until’’—the men of eyes who have 
seen the far-off light and interpreted it to 
those of us who dwell in the shady valley? 


There are wondrous instances of “till” 
and “until” in the New Testament. For 
example, in Matthew ii. 138, “until I bring 
thee word.” That is a new scheme of 
lodgment. How long have I to remain 
here? and the angel says, Until I come 
back. I want to be moving. Sit still! I 
do not see why I cannot proceed further. 


THE EPHESIANS 101 


Wait until I bring thee word in thy little 
business, thy little household environment, 
thy limited village or limited circumstances ; 
lodge there until I bring thee word: I will 
not forget thee: God knows the address—He 
never forgets an address, He never mixes in 
indiscriminate confusion the dwellings of 
those who love Him with the dwellings of 
those who despise Him: wait “until!’’ Thank 
God for that “until”! It is itself a limi- 
tation. Whilst it appears to be the indication 
of a great space or of great time, it fixes a 
point of return, of deliverance, of liberty, of 
light. Oh, it is so long! So it is; but the 
length of the waiting is part of the education 
of the soul. When shall I see him, see her, 
again ? could I not see for one little golden 
hour in the week? I ask no more. And 
the angel said, Remain until I bring thee 
word ; I watch all the dressing and prepara- 
tion and equipment; I know when spirit 
should meet spirit, when alliances should 
be completed or renewed; when the veil 
should be blown to pieces or withdrawn like a 
curtain of film; I understand the counsel of 
God in this matter ; stop until—until—until. 


102 THE EPISTLE TO 


The Apostles were not men much given to 
a very high order of patience. Like ourselves, 
they always wanted to be doing something. 
Some men cannot be really happy unless 
they are doing a little; it may be only 
opening and shutting an umbrella, but they 
must be at it, they cannot keep their hands 
off it. Well, they were made so, and God 
will read such riddles to us when we have 
nothing better to do than to listen to their 
reading. The Apostles were men of this 
sort: Wilt Thou at this time restore the 
kingdom unto Israel? Wait; it is not for 
you to know the times and the seasons. 
What shall we do when we are bereaved of 
our Lord? ‘Tarry in Jerusalem. How long? 
Until ye be endued with power from on 
high. What are we to do in the mean- 
time? Do nothing. We think we can be 
doing something. You think wrongly. Do 
not do anything in your own strength, 
because you will only live to apologise for 
having done it. Do not imagine that you 
see anything as it really is; the secret of 
the centuries is with God. ‘Tarry ye in 
Jerusalem until you get the power. There 


THE EPHESIANS 108 


is no mistaking power. The difference be- 
tween one man and another often is that 
one man can do it, and another man cannot 
do it; and the great mischief is that the 
man who cannot do it is tempted of the 
devil to believe that he can do it as well 
as the other man. We have to wait until 
there is a great flood-tide of power, a con- 
scious access or accession of strength; when 
that mighty power comes upon us, then we 
may go forth and do the Lord’s will. Waiting 
is education. We are taking in elements of 
strength when we hardly know that we are 
doing so. But one clear day at the seaside, 
when the wind is coming over the sea, some- 
times makes an old man young again. What 
has he been doing? Nothing; and doing 
everything by doing that nothing: putting 
himself into right relation, waiting for proper 
opportunities—lying sweetly, softly, dreamily 
in the arms of God, the Father-Mother; next 
day he enters upon a renewed inheritance of 
energy; all the time the kindly wind was 
breathing into him new power and displacing 
old weakness. Tarry ye until you are con- 
scious of power—not of power only, but of 


104 THE EPISTLE TO 


power from on high; that is, not only a 
certain degree of power, but a certain 
quality of strength; then go forth, and no 
man shall be able to stand against the hosts 
of the Lord. Oh! this neglect of the Spirit, 
this disregard of the Fountain of energy, 
this broken and _ hesitating companionship 
with the angel powers of the universe, who 
are waiting to nourish us and cherish us and 
nurse us out of-our infirmity into God’s own 
true strength. We think we are making 
progress when we are only going round and 
round in a circle. You cannot teach the right 
idea of progress to some persons. A man 
does not go across the Atlantic by walking 
round and round the mainmast; that is not 
the action which is progress; there is an 
action that has no forwardness in it. God 
Himself takes us through the right exercises 
and keeps us on the right line. But we 
cannot wait for the power. We think we 
have the power, and therein we become 
weak as other men. Where the power is 
really given there is no mistake about its 
quality. You cannot explain it; all power 
is a mystery, except the merely mechanical 


THE EPHESIANS 105 


power; but the dynamic power—the inside, 
or what we may term the almost spiritual 
power—who can understand or interpret? 
Yet there is no mistaking its effects; its 
energy is indescribable, but patent and in- 
disputable. The Church will not wait for 
power; the Church wants to mechanise its 
own strength, to get up its own new little 
programme of progress: and the Lord Himself 
watches such poor little paper kingdoms take 
fire—go up into smoke, and fall back into 
dust. The Church of Christ to-day and every 
day ought to be the mightiest force in the 
world. It has all the elements, all the pro- 
mises ; it has not the faith. It proposes and 
compromises and begs pardon of the devil, 
and hopes he is not unduly inconvenienced. 
What becomes of such a Church? Wreck, 
ruin, oblivion, or contempt. 


The Apostle frequently uses the words 
“till” and “until”; notably in 1 Corin- 
thians xi. 26, “show the Lord’s death till 
He come.” ‘There are so many double sen- 
tences in Holy Scripture, and so many people 
have never noticed them. ‘They are too busy 


106 THE EPISTLE TO 


with their Christmas beef to read the Word 
of the living God. These Biblical double 
sentences are great jewels, and we are not 
forbidden to decorate with such ornaments. 
Hear David, the greatest master of plaintive 
poetry that the world ever knew; saith he: 
*T shall go to him, he shall not return to 
me.” There is the double action. I always 
want to reverse that sentence, that I may 
feel more acutely the tenderness of its 
meaning: “ He shall not return to me, but I 
shall go to him.” The assurance that I shall 
go to him makes him live in the very 
grave; I am moving in a curve unknown 
to geometry—we shall come face to face in 
the by-and-by. So when Paul tells me about 
my Lord’s death he hardly gets the word out 
of his mouth before he says, “ till He come.” 
That is the true rhetoric, the divine eloquence, 
the substantial and indestructible logic. We 
do indeed show forth a death, but we only 
show it forth until it be turned into life, 
until it be forgotten and the grave is destined 
to be forgotten, and one day the new earth 
may not remember that ever a grave was 
cut in the old earth. If in that day we 


THE EPHESIANS 107 


should ask for reminiscences of the grave, 
the new earth will be stupefied by our very 
inquiry, it will not know what language we 
are speaking. Death, grave, loss, pain—is 
there any interpreter who will tell me, poor 
old earth, what these words mean? And lo, 
there shall be no interpreter. The language 
was only invented that it might be forgotten. 


We are reading in Paul’s Epistle to the 
Ephesians. It is more like walking through 
a forest than dallying in a garden. We 
must in many a case give up his grammar 
and acquaint ourselves with the music of 
his soul. Paul did not write much; when 
he did write he wrote as a blind man might 
be supposed to write—in large capital letters 
—saying, ‘‘ Ye see how large a letter I have 
written unto you with mine own hand.” 
Poor weak-eyed man, he could hardly see 
the boldest capitals which he inscribed upon 
his paper; and as a tired man he thought 
he had done more than he really had done; 
he thought it was a large letter because it 
took so much out of him. There are many 
standards of measurement. 


108 THE EPISTLE TO 


This Epistle to the Ephesians must be true 
in its divinity because it is so palpably—and 
shall I say glaringly >—true in its humanity. 
Where the one thing which we can test is 
so true, the probability is that that which 
is beyond the present metaphysic—that which 
is spiritual and transcendental—is also true. 
What a grasp of human nature the Apostle 
always has! He seems to lay a great grip 
upon us and explain us to ourselves. We 
are not dealing with a posture-master, nor 
are we in commerce with a man who gives 
small rules in etiquette and superficial inter- 
pretations in religious ceremony; we feel a 
great grip on the soul, and a man telling 
us through the ear of the body into the ear 
of the spirit what we are by nature, by 
conduct, under whose dominion we live; and 
we confirm his testimony, saying a great, 
tearful, terrible Amen. It is as thou hast 
spoken. What a delight it is to have con- 
fidence in the teacher! How exceedingly 
disquieting it is to walk through perilous 
places with a man who is himself afraid! 
His fear doubles the peril. If we were 
within the shadow of a great strong man— 


THE EPHESIANS 109 


within hearing of a man who could speak 
great, sure words to us—we should feel that 
“well begun is half done,” we should make 
a temple of his confidence and rest in it, 
yea, and sometimes fall to singing as if we 
were the happier for the danger. It is so 
we feel when we are in the companionship 
of the Apostle Paul. His benedictions are 
inspirations ; his instructions are battles; his 
battles are victories 


We have come to the fourteenth verse of 
the fourth chapter: 


“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed 
to and fro, and carried about with every wind of 
doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, 
whereby they le in wait to deceive.” 

Yet we must always be children. Children 
are so good that we baptize them; we receive 
them into our arms with this certificate, 
written in light and perfumed in the incense 
of the morning, “Of such is the kingdom 
of God,” and we baptize them with the dew 
of the morning. Yet we must in another 
sense no longer be children, we must not 
tarry in the cradle; he would be a monster, 


110 THE EPISTLE TO 


not a man, who at thirty years of age still 
needed to be rocked to sleep in his cradle. 
It is in these things that we are not to be 
children; not in the child-sense, the child- 
like sense, the little clinging, trustful, child- 
sense ; always that; in that sense the heavens 
are full of cradles. To God we must always 
be beginning; to the Infinite we must 
always be little sparklets, mere specks and 
blossoms of things, holding within us great 
and solemn possibilities. In another sense 
we are not to be childish, foolish, receiving 
instruction and letting it fall out of the 
mind as soon as it gets into it; in that sense 
let us be no more children, tossed to and 
fro, carried about by every wind; that is 
the children’s little game, and for children 
it is natural and it is pleasant. What is 
the child going to be? Ask the little 
creature to tell you on Monday what it is 
going to be, and the child has a Monday 
answer; on Tuesday, “What are you going 
to be?” Something other than was said on 
Monday. It is the privilege of little boys 
to be one thing one day and another another, 
and seven different things every week: that 


THE EPHESIANS HSE 


is natural and beautiful; but there comes a 
time when all this uncertainty and movable- 
ness of mind must end—a decision must be 
come to, we must make an election or a 
choice; henceforth we must be men with a 
definite programme, an assured purpose, 
a worthy scheme of life. The mischief is 
that some people have no plan of existence; 
they live from hand to mouth, and generally 
at other people’s expense; most of them have 
an idea that they could be something very 
great, which is a certain sign that they will 
never mount the ladder. The Apostle would 
have us fix upon a scheme, plan, or thought 
of life, and keep to it. Persistence is success. 
If you are seven different things on the seven 
different days of the week, what can you 
possibly come to? If a man shall be a 
lecturer, a politician, an adventurer, a painter, 
and a preacher, he will be a poor preacher. 
You cannot be all that, and a preacher. A 
preacher is never thrown in; he is never 
mixed up under the indefinite designation 
_ of an “et cetera.”’ That is the reason why 
I have seen some men fail in the pulpit. 
They were so much more eager to get up 


112 THE EPISTLE TO 


on Monday morning to go to the picture 
gallery than they were to get up on Sunday 
morning to go to the pulpit; they deserved 
to fail. That is why I have seen other men 
succeed with but moderate talents; they 
have been faithful to their call—defin iteand 
certain in their convictions; patiently and 
lovingly they have continued at their work; 
and patient continuance in well-doing means 
a diadem at the last, a “ Well done” that is 
more golden than a golden crown. The 
Apostle Paul, therefore, insists that there 
must be a period put to childishness, and 
he further insists that we must begin with 
a meaning and work with a purpose and 
light our way through the wilderness with 
the lamp of hope. 


Look what an image of human nature is 
given in these words—“ alienated from the 
life of God.” The whole of the eighteenth 
verse is a great nocturne, it is a picture 
struck out of a cloud, it is a statue hewn out 
of sevenfold midnight. ‘“‘ Having the under- 
standing darkened, being alienated from the 
life of God through the ignorance that is in 


THE EPHESIANS 115 


them.” ‘ Alienated from the life of God ”’— 
oh, how shall we represent that isolation, that 
desolated orphanage? Shall we imagine a 
tree taking its roots out of the earth and 
placing itself upon the face of a rock that 
it may have no more connection with the 
soil ?>—for the soil is full of light, the soil 
is full of dew; though there be no rain on 
the surface, there is dew at the core. We 
dig down to dew, and in all the strata 
through which we dig we are cutting sun- 
shine to pieces; the earth is a store of 
morning—a gallery piled with sunshine. 
Shall we imagine the poor tree saying, I 
will have none of it, I will tear myself out 
of this place, and instead of seeking to plant 
myself in another part of the soil I will lay 
myself down on the rock and turn my roots 
to the morning sun? It cannot be; for a 
day or two it may seem as though it were 
a possibility and even a fact, but only for a 
day or two; the tree must be rooted in the 
earth as the earth is rooted in God, where 
all things grow harmonically, proportionately, 
sympathetically, and tree waves to tree as 
hymn might sing to hymn. There is a dread 
8 


114 THE EPISTLE TO 


possibility of a man taking himself out of 
the current of things. The soul that takes 
itself out of the appointed currents shall 
die. No institution has a right to set itself 
outside the law of evolution. Evolution 
means purpose, scheme, predestination, sove- 
reignty of God, the outworking of a grand 
beneficent plan; and no man has a right 
to set himself outside the law and to let 
the law roll past him; if so, he does but 
make himself a nameless, hapless grave. 
Hence the folly of those persons who are 
always wanting to build themselves on a 
narrow interpretation of antiquity. We are 
thankful that “antiquity” is a word in the 
English language, because it has sometimes 
a kind of soothing and quieting effect upon 
a given species of mental adolescence and 
incompleteness. But the true antiquity is 
to-day; time has never been so old as it is 
at this moment; the hoar of the ages rested 
upon to-day as it was born into history. Let 
us, therefore, believe in spiritual evolution; 
let us get away from the nakedness of sin 
into the white linen of the saints, the purple 
and the true luxury of the divine sonship. 


THE EPHESIANS 115 


Many persons are trying to live without 
God; they are alienated from the life of 
God through the ignorance that is in them. 
They do not know that other people are 
praying for them, they do not understand 
the philosophy of intercession. We know 
not who may be praying for us in the general 
assembly and Church of the firstborn; but 
we know that Jesus Christ Himself ever 
liveth to make intercession for us. It would 
be like human nature to take favours from 
God, and to smite the hand that gives them. 
There may be atheists; I never met one; I 
have met not a few who have professed 
atheism ; the word was greater than their 
understanding of it; the little boy who 
carries his yard of string in his pocket 
really cannot, however ambitious his inten- 
tion, fathom the Atlantic. 


There is another expression in the eighteenth 
verse that is so true—“ the blindness of their 
heart.” Do not pity the blind man on the 
streets with his little dog and his mendicant’s 
little tin; that is not the man to pity; the 
man to pity may be the man who is pitying 


116 THE EPISTLE TO 


him ; for the one man has lost only the eyes of 
the body, the other may be blind in his heart; 
he does not see moral distinctions, he does not 
recognise spiritual differences; he takes the 
right for the wrong, and the right for the 
left, and he goes up under the impression 
that he is going down, and he goes down 
under the impression that he is going up, 
and he lives in mental and moral confusion. 
There are moral lunatics; do not go to the 
lunatic asylum and say concerning the in- 
mates, “ Poor creatures! how sad to have lost 
reason and understanding!” It is a poor 
speech ; the real lunatic may be outside the 
asylum. He is a lunatic who does not under- 
stand anything of God, truth, light, beauty, 
goodness. The first shall be last, and the last 
shall be first. What if we who pity the blind 
and the unseen should ourselves be blind in 
heart and darkened in understanding ? Fool! 
I would say to my poor soul sometimes, 
Thou art the blind, thou art the insane, 
for the King passed and thou didst not see 
Him; the whole universe is an argument 
in parable, and thou didst not understand 
the sun. 


THE EPHESIANS 117 


In the nineteenth verse there is an expres- 
sion more terrible, if possible, than we have 
yet come upon. “ Past feeling.” Read the 
whole verse : 

“Who being past feeling have given themselves 
over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with 
greediness.” 

“Past feeling.’ Is not he past feeling 
who for thirty years has heard the Gospel 
preached with simplicity and pathos and 
power, and is to-day a worm of the earth, 
a groveller in the mud? “Past feeling” : 
the spring comes without being hailed and 
saluted, and the summer is allowed to pass 
by without a smile of recognition, and the 
golden autumn is only regarded as a con- 
tribution to the market-place, and all the 
jewellery of frost and all the spotless linen 
of the mountain snow go for nothing, because 
he who was made in the image and likeness 
of God has lost sensibility and power of 
response to all poetic and ideal and spiritual 
appeals. On some people everything is lost ; 
on some hearts we waste our kindness; on 
some lives fathers and mothers have thrown 
themselves away, their generous love being 


118 THE EPISTLE TO 


regarded as a commonplace that comes 
without appreciation or response. It is 
possible to be overfed religiously; it is pos- 
sible to hear too much good preaching; it 
is possible to hear it under the impression - 
that it comes as a mere matter of course; 
not knowing that every sentence is a blood- 
drop, every cry of the appealing heart a 
loss of nervous energy. To preach to people 
who are “past feeling,” that must be soli- 
tude and desolation and unutterable misery. 
Given over, given themselves over to work - 
with greediness all manner of badness—to 
work with the right hand, with the left 
hand, and work with both the hands, and 
love it, and kiss it, and work it over and 
over again, and roll it under the tongue as 
a sweet morsel; and then say they have been 
to church. To hell! 

In all this magnificent portrayal of human 
nature there are top-lights, half-lights, bright 
lights, gleaming above the brightness of the 
sun. For example, Paul talks about coming 
“unto a perfect man.” He will not despair 
at all the rubbish which he has been 


THE EPHESIANS 119 


portraying and pathetically describing; he 
sees the possibility of growth. “A perfect 
man” means “a mature man,” a full-grown 
man who has reached the highest inch of his 
possible stature—not a perfect man in any 
merely sentimental and pietistic sense, but 
full grown. The orchard is perfect when 
the apples are ready for plucking; the acres 
are perfect when the golden grain swings 
in the gentle breeze, and says without words, 
I am ready to be cut down and to be turned 
into bread. 


And what a beautiful expression we find in 
the fifteenth verse—“ speaking the truth in 
love’’: truthing it in love, doing everything 
‘in love; growing up into Him in all things 


-_ in love; finding our duty in love. If we lose 


this power of love we cannot do any duty, 
we cannot be our best selves. It is motive 
that gives a man the true self-possession. 
His mere taste or his mere sense of duty 
might shrink from certain tasks and efforts. 
To mere duty the day is so long; to love, 
the longest day that June can show us is 
but a flash of light. If we go to church 


120 THE EPISTLE TO 


because it is our duty we shall never get 
there ; we may get there in the body, a ton 
weight of stupidity; but if we go because 
we have been hungering and thirsting after 
the holy exercise, we heed nor rain nor snow 
nor burning sun nor long distance over the 
city streets; we fly in great expectation and 
with great warmth and glow of love. It is 
the same with everything else ; with painting, 
with music, with writing books, with daily 
drudgery, with household tasks. If we do 
these things when we do not want to do 
them we shall be burdened and utterly dis- 
tressed ; but if we work in the spirit of love, 
then let work come, and more and more of — 
it—it does but multiply the acreage of a 
sunny and gladsome field. And then, in 
another sense, we are to be filled with a 
spirit of love that makes increase, love that 
edifies itself in love, love that doubles itself, 
love that says to the labourer, ‘‘ I will love 
you still more ; if you will work another hour 
I will bring to your hands all you want, and 
we will both do it together.’’ Love building 
itself up in love—tautology to the gram- 
marian, poetry to the poet. 


THE EPHESIANS 121 


And how is all this to be doneP By being 
renewed in the spirit of our mind, according 
to verse 23. ‘‘ Renewed,” that is great; “in 
the spirit,” that is great; “in the spirit of 
your mind’’—oh, that is getting to a very 
inward part of the soul, piercing through 
fold after fold, until the light—the grace of 
God—gets into the very beginning of man- 
hood and renews it. That is regeneration ; 
not a new notion, a new opinion, a new 
theory in morals, in theology, in politics, in 
patriotism; no, but a new man. Many 
“persons are renewed in their opinions who 
are not renewed in the spirit of their mind. 
The Word of God is sharper than a two- 
edged sword, it pierces to the dividing 
asunder of the joints and marrow, and is a 
discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
heart; and until we are cleansed in there, 
in that central centre, we do not know the 
meaning of the kingdom of God ; and nothing 
can get in there with cleansing power but 
one thing—the blood of Jesus Christ. Pre- 
cious Saviour, mighty Saviour, send Thy 
cleansing blood through the innermost cur- 
rents of my heart, that I may be without 


122 THE EPISTLE TO 


spot or wrinkle or taint or stain—holy after 
the quality of the divine purity! 


Up to this time the Apostle has been talk- 
ing great words and greater thoughts to the 
Ephesian Church. He has never been so 
verbally magnificent or so spiritually sublime. 
We thought, He will surely keep upon this 
level to the end: who can come down from the 
stars—from the golden clouds—to speak about 
common things? But the Apostle had this 
rare and great gift. It was never more than 
a step from t e sublimest contemplations to 
the simplest household duties, and it was 
never more than a step from the simplest 
household duties to the most magnificent 
spiritual conceptions that could warm the 
imagination and lift up the whole life of the 
soul to heavenly visions and celestial har- 
monies. We have read his grand words, let 
us now read some of his simpler ones. 


Verse 25 startles us. We must have time 
to recover our breath. He addresses an ex- 
hortation to the Ephesian Church that from 
some aspects appears to be ridiculous. After 


THE EPHESIANS 123 


what we have heard of foresight, fore-ordi- 
nation, calling, election, condescension, it 
seems to be an anticlimax to say, 


“ Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man 
truth with his neighbour: for we are members one 
of another.” 


For a moment we had been lost in transcen- 
dental visions and possibilities, and suddenly 
we are told not to tell any more lies! Who 
but Paul could take such liberties, as we 
should deem them, with coherence and se- 
quence and natural climacteric logic? But 
Paul will have his way—his soul speaks as 
it thinks ; we hear, as it were, the very going 
of his soul’s thought. If any preacher or 
teacher were to follow this course we should 
blame him, because we go by little logic 
books and rhetoric books and examples of 
verbal propriety; and thus we kill ourselves 
with wooden knives. It is very sad to shut 
the soul up within a cage of prescribed rules. 
Oh for the mountain air, for the open-air 
preacher, for the man on the mount that talks 
as the winds blow, now in breezes, in tempests 
_ always laden with fragrance from the summer 


124 THE EPISTLE TO 


land! ‘Wherefore putting away lying, speak 
every man truth with his neighbour.” If 
this were the rule of statesmanship and 
diplomacy and commerce, life would be ended 
almost abruptly. Could the world live one 
day if every man spake truth with his neigh- 
bour? That gun of verity would blow the 
fortifications of society into splinters and 
ashes. Does a man always speak truth to 
himself? That is the first great lesson in 
certain departments of spiritual life and edu- 
cation. Really and truly to tell a man what 
he knows himself to be, and to speak every 
word slowly, deliberately, and to thrust it 
into the soul as a naked sword—who could 
live? Yet how pious we are, and how ex- 
ceedingly punctual and regular and methodical 
in all our religious habitudes! Yet possibly 
the most regular and the most admirable, 
from a mechanical point of view, may be the 
man who dare not look in upon himself and 
say to his soul, You are a villain! When 
man talks so he will need the Cross; so long 
as he tells lies to himself, what need of re- 
deeming blood and divine priesthood ? They 
are mistakes, exaggerations, out of keeping 


THE EPHESIANS 125 


with the tone of daily conduct and habitude. 
The Apostle gives us his reason for speaking 
truth to one another— For we are members 
one of another”; that we belong to one 
another ; that truth-speaking is social justice ; 
that to be plain, candid, and straightforward 
is a debt we owe, and that we ought to lay 
down the golden words—sterling metal as it 
were—on the counter of righteousness. Who 
could live? ‘Truly the Word of God is sharp 
and powerful, piercing asunder to the dividing 
of the joints and marrow, and to be holy is no 
holiday, to be holy is no matter of intellectual 
entertainment or frivolity; it is first of all, 
midst of all, last of all, self-slaughter. Where 
are the Christians P 


Then the Apostle proceeds to give us 
another instruction : 


Verse 26: “ Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the 
sun go down upon your wrath.” 


But Paul has been talking about election 
and fore-ordination and the glory of the 
Church, and the vocation wherewith the 
people of God are called, and he has been 


126 THE EPISTLE TO 


almost lost in the mazes of his own ineffable 
eloquence ; now he comes back to the common 
turnpike of life, and says, “When you are 
angry, see that you do not drive the passion 
of anger too far; know when to stop. Self- 
control is one of the highest elements in holy 
anger. It is right to be angry, it is right to 
get into a tempestuous rage in relation to evil 
and evil suggestion and evil approach; but 
when it comes to being angry as between man 
and man, see that you do not turn your anger 
into a positive luxury on your own side, revel- 
ling in your anger, and rejoicing because your 
passion is so hot. I repeat,” the Apostle says 
in effect, “know just where to stop, because 
evil may become sin.” We have read of the 
old teacher Pythagoras, who had a school of 
rhetoric, dialectic, and general disputation. 
All the scholars in the school, we read, used 
to spring at one another, so to say, and in hot 
dispute chase the hours of the day; but their 
habit was, when the shadows gathered and the 
school was done, to fall upon each other and 
with a kiss of peace and brotherhood to close 
the intellectual fray. This is surely a very 
beautiful picture! It is only Christians of a 


THE EPHESIANS 127 


certain type that can carry over anger until 
to-morrow. The only Christianity some people 
seem to have is the power of nursing their 
wrath “to keep it warm.” I quote from a 
Scotch poet, but indeed he speaks the mother 
tongue of the world when he speaks so broad 
and true a sentiment. If you carry over 
your anger until to-morrow you lose your 
Christianity in the dark river of the night 
time. You must not remember yesterday’s 
anger. And who are you, that you should 
keep up the anger of the world? Know, O 
thou foolish man! that thou thyself needest 
forgiveness very much. It is audacity, obsti- 
nacy—utter badness on our part—to keep up 
the memory and the challenge of evil. If 
you have done wrong to any man, say so; and 
in the degree in which he is a Christian man 
his forgiveness will be uttered before your 
confession is complete. But there must be 
confession, or there cannot be forgiveness ; 
this is the divine plan—it is the plan of reason 
and sense and justice, and the only plan that 
can stand the strain of time. 


How shall we lower ourselves to bring our 


128 THE EPISTLE TO 


conduct under the fire of the twenty-eighth 
verse P 
“Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let 
him labour, working with his hands the thing which 
is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” 
What an impossible conception! We have 
been told that in Christ Jesus we are called, 
we have been challenged, to comprehend with 
all the saints what is the breadth and length 
and depth and height, and to know the love 
of Christ which passeth knowledge, that we 
might be filled with all the fulness of God. 
Now this ruthless, incalculable Apostle turns 
round upon us and says, “ Do not steal any 
more.” What violent alternations! Whata 
swing has this man’s arm! We are on the 
top of the mountain, and he throws us down 
into the valley; he finds us in the valley, 
lifts us up on to the top of the mountain; 
he whirls us round the glowing horizon. 
Who can follow him? Yet there may be 
coherence where we little suspected it; we 
may need in our spiritual education just 
those changes to arrest our attention and to 
give the slowest of us something to think 
about. But to have an eye upon us which 


THE EPHESIANS 129 


sees our thieving! We do not go to church 
to hear moral lessons, do we? We do not 
go to church to have weights and scales 
tested ? Wedo not go to church to have a 
sort of spiritual excise officer hunting up all 
our little methods and schemes, and following 
us into the cellars of our lives, that under- 
ground work and possession may be brought 
to a certain divine standard? We go to 
church to pray and sing and to be told how 
good we are! Paul does not minister in 
that church. Paul could be rich in poverty, 
or he would soon be a pastor without a 
charge; Paul could live on next to nothing 
if he asked a blessing upon it, otherwise 
what a poor congregation he would have! 
We do not steal! The Apostle Paul says, 
“Wait a moment, and be quite sure before 
you speak ; ‘stealing’ is a larger word than 
it looks. A man who takes off five minutes 
from his employer’s time is a thief, though 
he may sing many hymns and be able to 
find fault with the way in which other 
people sing them. The man that takes 
away five minutes from his servant’s time 
without recognising it is a thief.” Is the 
9 


130 THE EPISTLE TO 


law so impartial as that? Yes! that is 
Christianity reduced to practice. He who 
bears false witness against his neighbour 
is a thief. He who keeps back the»one 
sweet word that would have turned a diffi- 
cult message into music is a thief. The 
Apostle says to the vulgar thief and to the 
refined or intellectual thief, “ Let him that 
stole steal no more.”” His eyes were evidently 
fastened suspiciously upon the men who made 
stealing a kind of livelihood. Can the Apostle, 
who has been speaking about election, fore- 
ordination, and all the transcendental wisdom 
and mystery of the kingdom of God, con- 
descend to speak to a common thief? That 
is what Christianity does—that is what is done 
by the two commandments on which “ hang 
all the law and the prophets.’”’ What is the 
thief to do? Some men seem to be born 
thieves. The Apostle has the answer; he 
says, “Let him work, let him labour.” 
How? “With his hands.” That is bring- 
ing down the instruction to a fine point. 
Not only ‘“ Let him labour with his hands,” 
but, “Let him labour with his hands for a 
purpose, that he may have something to give 


THE EPHESIANS 131 


to the other man.” Why, Christianity is most 
practical, and yet some people are leaving 
the Church because they want to do some- 
thing that is according to their own inter- 
pretation of the term “practical”! They 
need not leave the Church to do that. He 
who keeps company with the ten command- 
ments need not go from home to warm his 
hands; he who keeps within the shadow of 
the Cross need not go to some other camp 
to know the meaning of “discipline.” And 
discipline is the proof of Christianity. Do 
not be confused over metaphysical terms 
which will be understood here and now, but 
enter into what is the more obviously prac- 
tical gate of the kingdom, and you will find 
that as you work away with diligence and 
industrious care you will little by little get 
into all the metaphysics you need. Mean- 
while, no lying, no thieving, but truth-speak- 
ing, hand-working; your hands were made 
to labour, and he is the independent man 
who can work with his fingers. His inde- 
pendence will be a small paltry god not 
worth worshipping; he must so labour that 
he can save something, and so save something 


ae 
132 THE EPISTLE TO 


that he may have something to give away. 

That will keep him right by the Spirit and 
the grace and the blood of Christ. 

Verse 29: “Let no corrupt communication pro- 

ceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the 


use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the 
hearers.” 


Keep your mouth right. Oh the blessing 
of a sweet breath! I speak of it in the first 
instance as the natural breath. It is not 
given to all persons. What a treasure it 
is to have sweet breath, balmy breath, the 
breath of the summer morning, the breath 
of the sea-breeze, the breath of singing birds! 
No man can ever be thankful enough for 
having had parents whose natural breath 
was sweet; it is life, it is health, it is bene- 
diction. The Apostle says, Let the soul 
be sweet-breathed. ‘‘ Let no corrupt ”—that 
is, “no putrid or rotten ”—‘‘ communication 
proceed out of your mouth”: your words 
are your soul’s breath—let them be sweet, 
pure, healthy; let all persons who come 
within the range of your influence and 
ministry of life feel that they are in 
good company. You may trust your 


THE EPHESIANS 183 


child to the good man; the child will be 
the better for spending a day with the 
soul that is good. There is a_ breath 
that withers flowers; there is a breath that 
keeps them alive. Trust your girl to the 
man whose soul’s breath is sweet. Trust 
your children to those schools where the 
atmosphere is morally pure and exhilarating. 
Do not listen- to any man who speaks bad 
words in a bad breath. We thought when 
we began these readings that we were to 
walk mountains high, yea, to pass from 
mountain to cloud, and from cloud to star, 
and to know no more the language of the 
market-place or even the language of the 
common school. Yet suddenly, after having 
these long morning walks up in the higher 
air, we are brought down to the earth to 
love our neighbour as ourselves. 
Verses 30-32: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of 
God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemp- 
tion. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and 
clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with 
all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender- 


hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for 
Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” 


99 


“Grieve not the holy Spirit.” How can 


134 THE EPISTLE TO 


we then doubt the Trinity—the threefold, ~ 
inexplicable constitution of the Godhead ? 
The holy Spirit of God is not referred to 
here as an influence, an idealism, a feat of 
the religious imagination ; you cannot grieve — 
an influence, you cannot pierce and wound 
an idealism; the terms are wasted, and 
worse than wasted, if they do not indicate 
a distinct and sensitive personality. Notice 
the relation of the holy Spirit to the believing — 
heart. That relation is personal; the holy 
Spirit has sealed the believing soul and re- 
served it under every manifestation and proof 
of security to the day of redemption. It is 
not only a personal relation in a general 
sense, but personal in an individual sense, as 
if each particular heart were under the special 
ministry and care of the Third Person of 
the holy and ever blessed Trinity: to which 
Trinity be the homage of the universe! which 
is the footstool of God. The peculiarity of 
the relationship is in the fact that He is 
wounded by everything in our human thought 
that is opposed to the quality of His own 
purity. He cannot live with the unholy; 
it is not an intellectual vexation to Him, 


THE EPHESIANS 135 


for who could pity with fuller sympathy 
and completer understanding of human in- 
firmity >—it is a moral or spiritual grief to 
the Holy Ghost. If we sin we please the 
devil and we wound the Spirit of God. 
Holiness is always sensitive. Purity grows 
in sensitivity; what things we could once 
do with comparative indifference or impunity 
we cannot do to-day; they are the same 
things, but we are not the same men; we 
have grown to a fuller stature, we are called 
to the breathing of a purer atmosphere ; now 
we see things more clearly, so that what was 
once, it may be, little more than trifling and 
hardly to be considered, is now like dust in 
the eyes. We feel the sinfulness of sin just 
in proportion as we grow in the holiness of 
God. It is only in that sense that we have 
got away from the commandments of Sinai; 
the commandments are still there, and still 
in force, clothed with all their old dignity 
and imperishable authority; but we have 
erown away from them into a more spiritual 
interpretation of their purpose, so that now 
we are in daily communion with the holy 
Spirit of God. The killing letter is still 


1386 THE EPISTLE TO 





there, and still there are the rocks of Sinai; 
but there is a spirit of holiness, purity, and 
appreciation of all things divinely lovely, 
and it is in that higher experience that we 
develop a keener and more responsive sensi- 
tiveness. 


The thirty-first verse would seem surely 
to be quite superfluous when addressed to 
those who are believers in Christ Jesus: 

“Tet all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and 
clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, 
with all malice.” 

These are not only elementary truths, they 
ought to be impossible facts. If we have 
seen the kingdom of God at all, and have 
been called within the divine circle of light 
and vital progress, these words of the thirty- 
first verse ought to be left outside as terms too 
vulgar and demoralised even to be permitted 
expression in the air that has been made 
balmy and blessed by psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs. Yet sometimes it is well 
for us to be reminded how small a course 
we have made in Christian progress; it is 
well that we should hear the baying of the 


THE EPHESIANS 137 


old cruel hounds from which we thought 
we had escaped ; they are still within hearing 
 distance—their names are bitterness, and 
wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil- 
speaking, and malice, and they bark and 
bay as if they would once more spring upon 
our poor lives and drag us down and devour 
us like spirits of fury. We are inclined 
falsely to measure the progress which we 
suppose ourselves to have made: we think, 
after singing holy hymn and psalm, that 
surely we cannot be far from the gates of 
heaven; we have been lifted up to trans- 
figuration heights, we have heard in the 
spirit the voices of Moses and Elijah, the 
law and the prophets, the testimonies of 
old history and the prophecies of the richest 
experience; and lo, we are offended, dis- 
appointed, insulted, and in a moment the 
old nature rises, and there rush up the trans- 
figuration mount the old cruel hounds called 
bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, 
and evil-speaking, and malice, and if God 
do not protect us we shall even yet, though 
we have been on Tabor’s morning mountain, 
be devoured and destroyed by the enemy. 


138 THE EPISTLE TO 


* Let all bitterness ’’—that is, sharpness, 
acerbity of temper, acidity, sourness—‘ be 
done away.’ But so unwrought is that 
acerbity that, if it be taken out of us, 
what would there be left? We are so 
glutted with evil things that if we give 
them up who could see the cellular phantom 
that would be left—the phantom-self, the 
ghost not visible? So we have to be called 
back again and again to be reminded that 
we are in the body, that we are children of 
dust and of time, that only by patient con- 
tinuance in well-doing and earnest clinging 
to Christ, heart to heart, can we be lifted 
up into sonship and be conscious of immor- 
tality and the spirit of final triumph. It 
is.a hard run—it is a race over rough places; 
our feet bleed as they run over the flinty 
rocks. Yet there is a voice sounding to us 
far away yet near at hand, saying, “ Follow 
me; proceed, advance, never stand still”; 
and it is in obedience to that inspiring and 
exhilarating voice that we are enabled to 
keep going on still, saying, as the great 
night closes within us, “ Faint, yet pur- 
suing.” 


THE EPHESIANS 139 


The evil things that are mentioned in 
verse 31 remind us of what may in some 
sense be still grosser things from which pro- 
bably the most of nominal Christians have 
to a large extent escaped. Sins are distri- 
butable into two classes, and yet both the 
classes may be traced back to the same root. 
Sin is the same always, everywhere, and yet 
it hath a cunning of its own, a terrible de- 
ceitfulness, and a wondrous magical power of 
metamorphosis, so that it can change its aspect 
and drop its old name, and assume new titles 
and designations, and impersonate virtue and 
catch some semblance of the angels of light. 
We must watch it, we must beware of it; 
it isa cunning foe. We have got rid of its 
rougher aspects: are we not still under the 
dominion of its more spiritual potency? 
That is the question, and the Christian must 
face it, though he die in the facing of it. 
We have outgrown all the vulgarities of sin. 
We are not drunken, we are not guilty of 
common theft, we do not tell wilful and 
provable lies ; when the commandment comes 
to us saying, “Thou shalt not kill,” we 
answer with a kind of religious cheerfulness 


140 THE EPISTLE TO 


that we never thought of doing so; “ Thou 
shalt not commit adultery,” and we rise in 
a kind of anger to repel the mean suggestion. 
All that looks well, but what is it under 
spiritual analysis? when the criticism of 
God is brought to bear upon it, what does 
it amount to? does it amount to anything 
more than outward respectability, social dis- 
tinction as between the lowest and the — 
highest ? Is there any real religious signi- 
ficance and value in it? Is there not a 
voice penetrating the self-applauding soul, 
saying, “What do ye more than others? 
Do not even sinners the same?” Except 
your righteousness exceed the righteousness 
of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye cannot enter 
into the kingdom of heaven; be ye holy 
as your Father in heaven is holy. Then 
are we no longer on Sinai? We ought to 
be miles higher than Sinai ever reached ; 
it was an elementary school, it was but an 
alphabetic tuition; we ought to have passed 
into the heavenlies and the spiritualities, 
and to be able to interpret the command- 
ments into their brightest significance. We 
have escaped drunkenness and theft and 


THE EPHESIANS 141 


lying and murder and adultery: are we 
therefore good? No, not “therefore”; 
unless we can go further, we may fall more 
disastrously backward. 

What about pride, jealousy, readiness to 
take offence; what about evil-speaking ?— 
these were not mentioned on Sinai. To these 
heights we must slowly climb, the heights 
where we escape all these disennobling and 
disastrous ministries, suggestions, and in- 
fluences. Why, there are those who take a 
pride in pride; not knowing that they are 
grieving the holy Spirit of God. A man 
will exclaim that he is “very proud,” not 
knowing that he is wounding the Christ— 
cutting the Son of God with a sharp sword. 
There is more said in the Bible against pride 
than there is said against murder; and yet 
people seem to imagine that they are 
acquiring a species of dignity by being 
proud! The Lord beholdeth the proud afar 
off; and how far off soever it may be, it is 
too near Him. The Lord never spake kindly 
to pride, the Lord never encouraged the 
proud heart; the self-righteous He drove 
out of His presence. There is no salvation for 


142 ' THE EPISTLE TO 


the proud. The thief, the liar, the murderer, 
the adulterer, being penitent, may be saved— 
the proud soul never. But if it repent, then 
it is no longer proud; penitence is self- 
abasement, penitence is the throwing off of the 
old man with his plumed, rotten pride. Self- 
righteousness cannot even hear the Gospel, 
self-righteousness represents the deafness that 
never heard the brazen trumpet or the roar- 
ing thunder or any of the sounds that make 
up the music of the universe. Only the 
broken heart can hear with intelligence and 
profit about the Cross. To self-righteousness 
there is no Calvary; on the map of self- 
righteousness there is no place called Gol- 
gotha, nor is there a garden of Eden, nor 
is there a praying place. Think of it, be 
terrified by it; I have no comfort for the 
soul that dwells in the castle of its own self- 
approval. 

What about readiness to take offence? 
That readiness grieves the holy Spirit of God. 
Who am I that I should be offended P—I 
who have trampled the holy Ten under my 
feet and grieved the holy Spirit and en- 
couraged bitterness of feeling towards some 


THE EPHESIANS 143 


other poor soul, who in a moment of forget- 
fulness may have done me even an intentional 
injury. If I were really in Christ I should 
love him as it were even the more because he 
has done me that injury—‘* While we were 
yet sinners, Christ died for us”’; and to drink 
His blood, even in symbol, and then not to 
forgive those who have sinned against us, 
that is blasphemy. Who then can be saved ? 
What about evil-speaking ? Remember that 
bitterness and readiness to take offence and 
evil-speaking and malice belong to the more 
spiritual section or region of our lives. We 
have no bloody gully with which we have 
cut the throats of men, but have we not cut 
their hearts by bitter speeches, bitter thoughts, 
unholy desires? Let the butcher take his 
gully away—it is a symbol of the utterest 
vulgarity—whilst I look into my soul to find 
whether I have not a still bloodier weapon 
which is invisible and which cannot be traced 
to any manufacturing hand—a spirit of unfor- 
giveness and hardness and jealousy. Am I 
jealous when my brother goes to an office that 
is higher than mine? When his book circu- 
lates more widely than mine has circulated do 


144 THE EPISTLE TO 


I hate him and speak evil about him, and 
then go and drink a cup, full of redness, 
called ‘‘the crimson blood of Christ,” and pro- 
claim myself orthodox? Oh the shame of it! 
oh the hell that burns like a hot cinder in the | 
heart of it! The magistrate cannot lay hands 
upon us; we do not subject ourselves to the 
magistrate—we only wound the Lord, 


So much for the dark side of this apostolic 
exhortation: are there no bright spots—no 
lights that kindle from afar, and shed their 
genial, welcome radiance upon the page of 
life? Hear the Apostle: 

Verse 32: “ And be ye kind one to another, tender- 
hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s 
sake hath forgiven you.” 

We can only displace the negative by the 
positive. It is not enough to lay down our 
weapons of warfare—we must fill our hands 
with palms and branches and blossoms and 
fruits of kindness; we must not let our hands 
be empty—we must fill those hands with all 
the kindness of God; then, when the demon 
returns to reoccupy the hands out of which 
he has been cast, he will find that he cannot 


THE EPHESIANS 145 


return, for those same hands are full of the 
business of the Lord. ‘“ Tender-hearted !”’ 
sometimes the adjective weakens a word, 
often it splits up and dissipates the meaning 
of the substantive; but here is a hyphen that 
connects “ tender” with ‘‘ hearted,” and the 
two together make up a beautiful little poem. 
*Tender-hearted ! ”’ feeling so sensitive as to 
be utterly unable to hurt another man. We 
often forget when we say we are very sensi- 
tive that we may be wounding the sensitive- 
ness of another soul. He is the refined man 
who never remarks upon another’s vulgarity, 
and he is the sensitive man who remembers 
that by a word he may hurt some soul that is.. 
groping for the light or whispering if haply 
the air may catch the undertone and carry 
it away until it swells into a spoken and a 
prevailing prayer. ‘“ Forgiving one another.” 
The meaning is that we all have occasion to 
forgive. What man is there who liveth and 
sinneth not? What man is there who does 
not require to say almost every day to those 
who labour with him, “ Pity me, I am weak; 
forgive me, I spoke in a moment of fever, and 
I was unjust to you; but I am sorry, pardon 
10 


146 THE EPISTLE TO 


me”? ‘That is the Christian atmosphere. 
There are some Christians who find it almost 
impossible to forgive. They can persecute 
finely, they can stand up for orthodoxy six 
feet high ; but to forgive—that is the supreme 
miracle of grace. And we, poor insect things, 
say we may forgive, but we cannot forget. 
Then you can never enter the kingdom of 
heaven; and do go and join the infidels—go to 
your own sect; do not stain the sacramental 
cup with lips livid with the anger of the 
devil. Our forgiveness will prove our ortho- 
doxy. Some people think that Christianity 
is a creed, whereas it is a disposition, a 
temper, a condition of the soul—broken- 
heartedness, readiness to forgive even the 
most rude and callous offender. 

Has the Apostle nothing but exhortation 
to offer us upon this point? The answer is 
sublime; he does not offer us exhortation, he 
offers us the reason which underlies all his 
arguments and all his appealing entreaty— 
“even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven 
you.” ‘Thus we are called to be followers of 
God; thus we are summoned to follow Christ; 


thus we have the true standard put into our © 


THE EPHESIANS 147 


possession by which we are to measure every- 
thing. Be ye holy, as God in Heaven; be ye 
perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is 
perfect. Does that mean that I am to be as 
holy as God in moral excellence, as perfect 
as God in spiritual purity? No! but it 
means that I am to follow on to know the 
Lord, to move in a certain direction, and 
under the impulse and sway of a certain 
encouragement. How is God perfect and 
tender and forgiving? 4He is kind to the 
unthankful and to the evil; He sends His 
rain and sunshine upon the just and upon the 
unjust ; and Jesus Christ, having told us this, 
says, “‘ Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven 
is perfect”; be larger, nobler, bring in a 
wider circle of those who need pity and 
sympathy and forgiveness and assistance. Is 
the Lord kind? No, not kind only, but this 
is a word which will bear an interpreting 
epithet; that epithet was discovered by the 
sweetest of all singers—the minstrel of the 
ages; he spake of kindness, and went on to 
speak of lovingkindness—made one massive 
_ word of it. Is God merciful? Nay, more 
than merciful: the same great singer invented 


148 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 


or attached another epithet even to mercy, and 
he called it “ tender’? mercy. Thus we have 
lovingkindness and tender mercy, and we are 
called to these high attainments little by 
little. Not merciful with a grudge, not kind 
with an upbraiding, but a right royal mercy, 
forgiveness, and kindness: on the divine 
scale, and according to the divine inspiration, 
be ye kind, tender-hearted, helpful, forgiving ; 
and if you ask me how—“as Christ,” “as 
God,” “‘as the Cross.” Do not dwarf the 
opportunity, but enlarge it, and when thou 
dost forgive, have so much forgiveness left 
that thou couldst do it seven times again, and 
then seventy times seven; for thou drawest 
thy forgiveness from the fountain of the 
Cross. 


CHAPTER V 


Verse 1: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as 
dear children.” 


UST like that! There is no lovelier 
metaphor in all this Book of parables. 
Why do we seek to change the figure? It 
means everything. If it is a cup, it is large 
enough to hold all the wine of God. “As’— 
then comes the figure. It would seem as if 
the parable fever warmed all the writers of 
the New Testament. The kingdom of God 
is like unto ; the kingdom of heaven is 
as ; be ye therefore followers as : 
It is always like something else, and that 
something else is always so clear and so 
beautiful that a child may see it. Yet how 
often have we made confusion of the beauti- 
ful; how often have we painted it as if we 
were expressing some resentment against its 


purpose! When all is so clear, why this love 
149 











150 THE EPISTLE TO 


of blurring and confusion and intermixing, so 
that the soul misses all that is nutritious in 
the holy feast? As children, as dear children, 
as little children—how much further will he 
carry the figure? He is already touching the ~ 
living nerve, his fingers are on the chords 
that thrill with divinest music of response. 
That is what he means to do—that is what he 
means to be. But this would drive away so 
many. No doubt; it would drive away all 
the wise and intellectually proud and self- 
conceited, and people who through so-called 
“culture”’ are finding their way to the devil. 
Nothing has kept so many people out of 
heaven as so-called ‘‘ culture.” I never heard 
a little child use that word; I do not think any 
little child ever heard it so as to remember it; 
no little child could spell it—no little child 
wants to spell it. We are not saved by philo- 
sophy, by culture, by erudition, by grammar, 
by high intellectual feats, and by marvellous 
ability in the guessing of conundrums; that 
is not the gate that opens on the kingdom 
of light and loveliness. “As children’’: is 
there no welcome to philosophers? None. 
Is there no gate for the learned menP None. 


THE EPHESIANS 151 


Philosophy and learning are not condemned, 
but they are put in their right places; that is 
all. It is not the philosopher that is saved, 
but the sinner; not the man of learning, but 
the man of broken-heartedness. One of the 
last books that John Bunyan thought of 
printing bore the title “The Excellence of 
the Broken Heart.” What a philosophy— 
without the name, the pretence, or the 
miserableness of it! It is the broken heart 
that finds the gate of the kingdom; it is the 
broken heart that alone can read the Bible 
and understand the words of Jesus; it is the 
heart that has renounced itself that can find 
room in the chamber of its love in which to 
entertain the Son of God. What a great 
burning of books there would be! Certainly ; 
whole libraries would be set ablaze at once, 
and no wise soul would stir a finger to put 
the fire out. We must get back to little 
children, dear children; we must become 
converted, and become as little children, if 
we would enter into the kingdom of heaven. 
We are sometimes permitted to use the word 
“man” or “men,” but always in a sense that 
is perfectly consistent with the idea of dear 


152 THE EPISTLE TO 


children, little children. For what is the 
oldest of us but a life new burning—a life 
just arrived from the other side of things; a 
new interpretation of the light and the beauty 
of the further house which is the house of the 
Father? ‘There are no old men except ac- 
cording to the calendars which we ourselves 
have made. We are great calendar makers; 
we make almanacs, and age ourselves ac- 
cording to their mean lines. We have no 
business with such poor literature. We come 
up with God, we were in His thought from 
the beginning, we engage His solicitude and 
His love every moment of our breathing. 
But man laughs at the ridiculous notion. The 
oak under which he will be buried is centuries 
older than he was when he breathed his last 
upon the earth. What, therefore, we have to 
cultivate is the child-heart. If we have the 


child-heart we can read the Bible with great 


edification and profit. One of the first things 
we shall know is that God cannot be known. 
There is no need to know Him here and now; 
but we see Jesus—we know God’s Son—and 
His Son is the express image of His person; 
and Jesus Christ says, “‘ He that hath seen Me 


THE EPHESIANS 153 


hath seen the Father.” That is His con- 
descending way of telling us that if we 
understand anything that Jesus says we 
understand just so much about God; for God 
speaks through His Son, and the words of His 
Son are written, and we know that they are 
the Son’s words because they cut us in pieces, 
they discipline—torture us—stretch us on a 
cross; therefore they are Christ’s words. Yet 
there be poor men who examine, collate, and 
compare divers manuscripts and dates and 
ages, to see if they can confirm the words. 
God send that they would accept the discipline, 
and then they would know whose words they 
are. No man ever sought to call human 
nature to God through such a gate as this— 
through such a process as this—that tears the 
joints, cuts the heart, pierces to the marrow, 
and has a calendar of discipline for every 
moment of the day. I need no literary proofs 
of my Lord’s words; I know they could not 
have come from man—I know that no devil 
ever thought of testing the heart with severest 
suffering ; I feel that the discipline of Christ 
is the proof of Christianity. 

If we could but be little children we should 


154 THE EPISTLE TO 


soon obey the exhortation of the Apostle, 
* Be ye therefore followers of God.” The 
literal word is, Be ye therefore imitators, 
copyists of God; that is to say, being Chris- 
tianized, Put your feet into the footprints of 
Jesus Christ—now a short step, now a long 
one ; now up the hill, now through the thorny 
places, now down the hill—which is another 
way of saying “up the hill”; for to go down 
the hill of time in the right spirit and in the 
right temper and at the right time is to go up 
the hill of eternity; the palace road, where 
_ the King’s house is at the top. Children 
imitate, children write upon pencil lines, 
children cannot trust themselves to write 
without the little railways cut upon the 
paper by a mother’s tender hand with a well- 
sharpened pencil; then the little scribe comes 
and writes between the lines. The little scribe 
does more than that; the little scribe first 
writes with a pencil, and through many a 
blunder stumbles upon the right thing at the 
last; and then, having done all the pencil 
work, it takes up the pen and the ink and 
runs great danger of making such sad blotting 
when it begins to copy from the pencil in ink, 


THE EPHESIANS 155 


Be ye imitators ; do not imagine that you can 
be great, fluent scribes all at once, writing the 
literature with a free, expert hand. Some of 
us have got the letter in our minds, and some 
of us have got it in pencil; but we dare not 
just yet begin the ink work, for where there is 
ink there is danger until the mother draws the 
lines. And then with what infinite pains and 
labour we copy the thing, and how ashamed 
we are when we spell badly—when we spell 
Heaven without an H—and when we have 
twice written a letter that should only have 
been written once; and then sometimes we 
take the ink copy away and begin another 
copy and write it without error in spelling or 
in shape of letters. Who will despise it? 
What man will frown upon it? Not one; 
neither will your Father which is in heaven 
frown upon your poor writing and poor spell- 
ing and poor grammar. He does not want 
either the writing or the spelling, either the 
erammar or the composition; He wants the 
meaning of the soul—He wants to know what 
your little child-heart would be at. That is 
satisfaction ; herein is our Father pleased by 
the child-likeness and the tenderness, the 


156 THE EPISTLE TO 


simplicity and the trustfulness of our young 
hearts. 


Verse 2: “ And walk in love, as Christ also hath 
loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offer- 
ing and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling 
savour.” 

What a wondrous expression of the 
Christian character! What power of en- 
couragement the Apostle had! If he had 
medicine to administer, how he capsuled 
the pill! When he wanted to say some- 
thing severe, how he approached us first 
along the line of recognition and apprecia- 
tion! After these tender words, I know 
Paul’s spirit and method so well, I believe 
he is going to say something morally severe. ~ 
This is the Pauline way. At present I am 
not supposed to know what he is going to 
say, but I never heard him talk like this 
without his presently saying something that 
will remind us that we are but men. In 
the meantime here is the godly and encou- 
raging exhortation, “Walk in love.” You 
will never regret having loved one another. 
I have been present at the closing scene of 
many a life; I never knew any one say, 


THE EPHESIANS 157 


“Tam sorry I did that good deed; I regret 
my charitableness and magnanimity and 
forgiveness; I deplore the fact that I was 
once kind even to an ungrateful man.” That 
is not the talk of the dying; that is not the 
talk of a true, healthy, noble piety. When 
we come to die, the things we regret are: 
our harsh words, severe dealings, sharp 
practices, cruel misinterpretations of other 
men’s expressions. What a dying is that! 
—that is the second death! The Apostle is 
going to say something morally severe; I 
feel quite sure of it, as experienced sailors 
know that there is an iceberg somewhere 
by a sudden chill of the air. Meanwhile, 
he is most gracious: ‘‘ walk in love,” and 
if you would know what I mean by walking 
in love I simply mean, Be Christlike; do 
in your degree what Jesus Christ did in 
His degree. He loved us, He gave Himself 
for us an offering and a sacrifice to God 
for a sweet-smelling savour.  JBrethren, 
keep near the Christ; do as nearly as 
possible what He did. Did ever a man 
come to Jesus and say, “ Lord, I repent,” 
and Jesus Christ turn him away? Never; 


aM i See 
- 43 oe 
., 

. 

4 


158 THE EPISTLE TO 


then He would have gone back upon 
His own words, He would have stultified 
Himself in His own temple, in the very 
presence of His own altar: for He said, 
“Tf thy brother trespass against thee 
and turn again, saying, ‘I repent,’ forgive 
him without a grudge—without a reserva- 
tion; and if he be a hypocrite, let his 
hypocrisy be his own responsibility; be 
thou true to the great sovereign law of 
causing forgiveness to follow penitence.” Be, 
then, as nearly as possible, just what Jesus 
Christ was. While we were yet sinners He 
died for us; the Son of Man is come to seek 
and to save that which was lost. We have 
the great Gospel offer made to us, and the 
great Gospel example set before us, and we 
are called upon to follow the Lord in all 
the way at whatever cost. This is not a 
popular way; this is not the tone of a 
demagogue; this Man has no acres to pzo- 
mise, and no fine habitations to offer. He 
says, ‘Come; whosoever. cometh after Me, 
let him take up his cross.” Thus are we to 
be made known to men; that is to say, as 
crossbearers, aS men who are marked with 


THE EPHESIANS 159 


a severe stigma, as men who carry the brand 
of Christ, as it were, in our very flesh. So 
to say, we shall be written all over with 
some kind of wound, so that men may know 
that we have been with Jesus, and have not 
only learned of Him, but have suffered with 
Him. Who, then, can be Christians? None; 
there is no Christian, if we come to these 
deeper interpretations and more spiritual 
tests; but forward amongst the hosts is one 
whose holy words are full of cheer: “I 
count not myself to have attained ’—that 
is right—‘‘but I follow after’—that is 
right—“ I follow on ”’—that is right. Many, 
many thousands—millions—are striving after 
Christ, desiring and panting to be like God, 
and their shortcomings shall not be reckoned 
against them, because, though faint, they are 
pursuing, and though not having yet attained, 
they are striving after the great heights. Do 
not let us therefore judge one another severely. 
Many a man may have more Christianity in 
his failure than many another man in his 
apparent success. The nearer we come to 
Christ the farther we shall sometimes follow 
Him. We fall short of Him; the colour is 


160 THE EPISTLE TO 


changing, the light is changing, the very 
standard within our own souls is changing, 
so that what we thought good yesterday we 
despise to-day, and we are hurt by yesterday’s 
poor virtue. Grow in grace, and by so grow- 
ing you will come to hate the self of which 
you were once proud. 

I dare not read aloud what the Apostle 
now says. I knew it was coming—I was sure 
of it. We must print verses 3, 4, 5, and let 
men read them in the secrecy of solitude— 
a solitude that is red with shame. 


“But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covet- 
ousness, let it not be once named among you, 
as becometh saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish 
talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but 
rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no 
whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, 
who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the 
kingdom of Christ and of God.” 


This brings us to one of the great alter- 
nations which mark the progress of the 
epistle. We are here and there in this 
epistle predestinated into the adoption of 
children chosen before the foundation of the 
world; we are redeemed by blood; we have 
received the franchise of pardon; we have 


THE EPHESIANS 161 


been dazzled by the riches of His grace. Now 
the Apostle says to us, “ Watch your lips, 
that evil words may not pour their poisoned 
liquid over your faces. There are some things 
you must not name; you must not know the 
meaning of some words; you must carefully 
choose the characters with whom you asso- 
ciate; and if a bad man shall speak a bad 
language, you are to look at him as a child 
might look who had never heard unholy 
words in his father’s house. The bad men 
- are skilful speakers, they are fluent in the 
use of vain words—be not ye therefore par- 
takers with them; ye were sometime dark- 
ness, but things have changed, you are now 
light in the Lord, and you must walk as 
children of light, and you must have no 
fellowship with the unfruitful works of 
darkness; you must by your very silence 
and the very significance of your look reprove 
them, and give the bad man to feel that he 
is in the presence of one who silently judges 
him and pierces him with the sharp judgment 
of God.” I knew this exhortation was coming ; 
we were strengthened for it; we were en- 
couraged to believe, that we might be dear 
11 


162 THE EPISTLE TO 


children of God and that we might be imi- 
tators of our Father in heaven. Then the 
Apostle, knowing the atmosphere of this 
earthly life, said, as it were in another tone 
—as if he had been talking instead of writing, 
and probably his tone changed in the act of 
dictating the epistle—he said, ‘“* But—but— 
but; there is another side. You are still in 
the world, and you will hear such words as 
‘uncleanness,’ ‘ filthiness,’ ‘foolish talking,’ 
‘whoremonger,’ ‘unclean person’: get back into 
the child state and the child heart and the 
home language and the better grammar—get 
away from this devil’s prose into God’s celes- 
tial poetry.”” He warns the Gentile converts 
against foolish talking and jesting—words 
that are often misunderstood. He is re- 
ferring to that spirit which would make a 
jest of God; he is not referring to vivacious 
conversation, kindly and innocent banter 
even, but to that kind of jesting that would 
joke at the altar, that miserable sort of 
jesting that would take the cup of sacra- 
ment and before partaking of it mock its 
red contents. That is what the Apostle 
meant when he wrote to the Corinthians 


THE EPHESIANS 163 


about no man drinking the cup unworthily ; 
not the man being unworthy, for every man 
is unworthy in the sight of God, but drinking 
it in an unworthy spirit, drinking it under 
a false interpretation of its meaning—turning 
a sacrament into drunkenness and rioting. 
And so he says, “‘ Where irreverence comes 
in piety is impossible; where men make a 
mock at sin there is no salvation for them 
until they repent of that folly.” How easy 
to mock the piety of others! Let not young 
Christians be dismayed because they are 
laughed at. A most beautiful thing occurred 
but the other day, when certain vagabonds, 
outlanders, were associated with a section of 
the loyal Dutch. The loyal Dutch were 
Bible-readers, and the vagabond outlanders 
mocked their hymn-singing and their Bible- 
reading, and to prevent further friction the 
loyal Dutch Bible-readers were taken away 
or went away, saying as they went, “ We are 
Bible-readers, and God will punish you for 
your folly.” And these men were punished 
that same night, and deserved to be. When 
men can mock Bible-reading they cannot win 
battles; when men give up the Sabbath Day 


164 THE EPISTLE TO 


they cannot be victorious soldiers. You 
cannot give up the Creator-and be great 
men, great painters, musicians, authors, 
leaders ; you cannot. The man who reads 
his Bible in the Biblical spirit and loves it 
will win every battle. Thank God! And 
the jesters and the mockers and the banterers 
and those who offer their vulgar, luxurious 
jest at the men of God, they shall go down. 
May no stone mark the sepulchre of such 
dogs | 


Verses 8-18: “For ye were sometimes darkness, 
but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children 
of light : (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness 
and righteousness and truth ;) proving what is accept- 
able unto the Lord. And have no fellowship with 
the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove 
them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things 
which are done of them in secret. But all things 
that are reproved are made manifest by the light: 
for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Where- 
fore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise 
from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See 
then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as 
wise, redeeming the time, because the days are eyil. 
Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what 
the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, 
wherein is excess ; but be filled with the Spirit.” 


Observe the striking series of contrasts in 
this marvellous passage. Let us trace the 


THE EPHESIANS 165 


series, and learn what we can from these 
contrastive pictures. The first is in the eighth 
verse. This word “darkness” is not indica- 
tive of mere dim or transient fog or incon- 
venient grading of light; it is a deeper, 
severer, ghastlier word. ‘‘Ye were sometimes 
darkness ’’—not dark, but darkness itself, 
sevenfold night—yea, more than night ever 
was ; for surely every night must have some- 
where and somehow its relieving star. It 
was not so with you in your former state; 
you were living darkness, without ray or 
glint or beam of light, as far away from light 
“as it is possible to be. That is a wonderful 
conception of human nature and of human 
condition before the Father of lights. You 
were not merely broken lights, scattered 
beams that it was impossible to put together ; 
there was no beam in you, you had never 
been illumined, you had never been warmed, 
you had never even heard of the summer of 
holiness—you were simply incarnate, embodied 
darkness. Who could call us out of that 
state? What matchmaker could strike a 
little flash that would drive away such 
gloom? Where the darkness is so dense God 


166 THE EPISTLE TO 


Himself must handle the occasion, or there is 
nothing for it but fatal night. Sometimes we 
have said of a great singer, “He is not musical, 
he is music””—that is to say, he is not a merely 
mechanical player, a man who has got into 
his memory what is written in a book, but the 
music is in him, a well of water springing up 
into everlasting melody. So, reversing the 
picture, the Gentiles were not dark, they were 
darkness—unpenetrated, and but for the 
divine mercy, impenetrable clouds. Occa- 
sionally we say of a man, “He is not eloquent, 
he is eloguence—embodied, incarnate, breath- 
ing, walking, living eloquence; he has not 
learned something by rote, he has not recited 
something of which his memory is in charge, 
but the holy gift is moving in him like a 
spirit, a genius, a heavenly choir.” Reverse 
the picture, and you have the Apostle’s idea. 
You were not dark, you were darkness—the 
thing itself, sevenfold night; no imagination 
could conceive the intensity of the darkness 
of your condition. 

Then the contrastive “but ’’—‘but now 
... light”; not partial light, not a grey 
light, not a mere hint of light, but as truly as 


; 


THE EPHESIANS 167 


you were once darkness, so truly are you now 
light. ‘‘ Walk as children of light.” The 
miracle is as great on the one side as on the 
other. Chaos was not partial chaos; chaos 
was not a mere mood or transient phase of 
disorder; it was utter confusion, without date, 
without measure, without figure, a tumultu- 
ousness and disorderliness not to be spoken of 
in words in any adequate sense or with any 
adequate fitness. Chaos is not partly order 
and partly confusion ; the old chaos on which 
the Holy Spirit brooded was utter chaos, 
shapelessness, amorphousness, that which could 
not be ruled into order by any skill created ; 
but now, since the beginning, chaos has given 
place to order, proportion, music, perspective, 
and all the apocalypse and summer of colour. 
That is the difference. Chaos has no history. 
People want to know when the creation 
began. They can never know it. All de- 
pends upon what you mean by creation. The 
thing upon which creation operated may be 
calculable, but the thing out of which creation 
took its materials may lie back, so to say, in 
the memory of God alone. Transfer the figure 
to the Christian life, and then you have first 


168 THE EPISTLE TO 


the darkness—utter, dense darkness, on which 
moon and star never shone, not to speak of 
dawning light and wakening morning; then 
you have light, glory, midday—points of 
extreme. Unless we recognise the extremity 
of the points we shall lose the whole move- 
ment of the miracle. Let us keep our 
memories well refreshed with the fact that 
once we were darkness ; let us pity those who 
are in darkness still. Do not imagine for a 
moment that the man on the street can come 
into the sanctuary of God and partake of it 
and be as one of the called saints of heaven 
all in a moment. He cannot; nor can he 
hear the Gospel, much less understand it. 
He is in darkness. A great mystery of move- 
ment must take place in his soul by the 
power of the Holy Ghost. We want again 
Genesis, first chapter and first few verses ; we 
want especially the Spirit brooding over the 
infinite night, the infinite disorder, with a 
view to having brought out of it proportion 
and harmony and rest. 

As to these workers of darkness, verse 11 
lays down the instruction succinctly and un- 
mistakably: ‘‘ Have no fellowship.” Do we 


THE EPHESIANS 169 


rest there? No; we come upon this remark 
able “ but,’’ which recurs in the passage quite 
startlingly : ‘but rather reprove them.” Do 
you mean rebuke them? No. Do you mean 
disallow them, or look unfavourably upon 
them, or look askance at them? No; all 
that, all that and something more: Convict 
them. The Holy Ghost shall reprove the 
world of sin, convict the world of sin. Do 
not hold any conversation with the unfruitful 
works of darkness; have nothing to do with 
them; repel them when they come near you, 
shrink away from them as if some horrible 
plague were in the air, and you were afraid of 
being blighted by the fatal pestilence. Now 
we have escaped all that, and we have come 
to the age of toleration, and we call toleration 
charity, and thus we unwed that holy bride, 
and tear her away from righteousness and 
justice, and drive her out into the wilderness 
to talk an alien tongue. We have now great 
toleration for people who are of a contrary 
persuasion to our own; we compromise with 
the works of darkness; the day says to the 
night, “‘ Let us say no more about our differ- 
ences, but let us compromise in a neutral tint 


170 THE EPISTLE TO 


or tone of colour, and let us lay down the 
noble democratic doctrine that one thing is 
as good as another in its own sphere, and 
if taken in its own atmosphere and in its 
proper relationships to the universe at large.” 
So we are feeble, we are a school of cripples, 
we are a home of incurables ; we have lost the 
nerve, the muscle, the tremendous energy 
that moved the world some centuries ago. 
We now live comfortably with all our oppo- 
nents, and with regard to divers social prac- 
tices we have compromised upon them; we 
come to church in the morning, and receive 
our friends in the afternoon, and slander the 
absentees over the cup which cheers but not 
inebriates. We used to go to church twice a 
day ; now it is enough to get it over in the 
morning as early as possible, and then have 
the whole day—mayhap for “the unfruitful 
works of darkness.”” Have we lost the sharp- 
ness of division? I am not now speaking 
about differences of opinion; opinion goes a 
short way in this great difference. This is 
not a matter of intellectual pedantry or 
ecclesiastical persuasion as to this form or 
that form—questions upon which men may 


THE EPHESIANS 171 


honestly or even profitably differ. I am 
speaking about moral antagonisms, about God 
and the devil; and they cannot compromise. 
We belong to one or the other, we cannot 
serve God and Mammon—not the “ cannot ”’ 
of inconvenience, but the “cannot” of a 
transcendental necessity; the thing cannot 
be done. The Apostle Paul operated upon 
this grand doctrine of separation: ‘‘ Come out 
from among them,” said he, “and be ye sepa- 
rate”’; and he said he was speaking the word 
of the Lord; for what fellowship hath light 
with darkness? So he is consistent with 
himself in writing to the Ephesians and the 
Corinthians. Division, separation of a moral 
and spiritual kind, leaving all our necessary 
and not wholly unhappy differences of mere 
opinion to settle themselves; but the moral 
and immoral cannot sign the same document ; 

they do not serve the same king; their souls 
are different; they are irreconcilable. 

Then in verse 15 he says, ‘‘not as fools,” 
then the inevitable “but.” What a series of 
“not” and “but”! ‘ Not as fools, but as 
wise.” “ Fools” is a word of many meanings in 
the Scripture: senseless, nousless, having no 


172 THE EPISTLE TO 


shrewdness of mind, having no moral sensi- 
tiveness, confusing things that differ, making 
mistakes and thinking nothing of them, as to 
their moral value and their relationship to 
the remaining links and duties of life. Some- 
times the ‘‘ fool’ means the withered heart ; 
the intellect is there, sharp enough, shrewd 
enough, trying to live upon its own problems 
and its own rude guesses at life’s conundrums; 
but the heart is gone. It has faded like a 
leaf ; it has withered like a leaf that falls 
from a branch that seems to shake it down > 
with contempt. ‘ The fool hath said in 
his heart, There is no God”: not the intel- 
lectual fool, but the withered heart, the 
heart that is desiccated, juiceless, pithless, 
that which is leather which was once flesh— 
the heart in its withered late autumnal days 
says, ‘There is no God.” And tothe withered 
heart what God can there be? Is not the 
heart the man at his best ? Does it not mean 
not only sensibility, but tenderness and sym- 
pathy and all the words that belong to the 
line of high sentiment ? Is not the heart the 
home of the man, the innermost sanctuary 
and altar of the soul? The heart sees, the 


THE EPHESIANS 173 


heart becomes the noblest intellect ; the heart 
under the right conditions will see more of 
God than the mere brain can ever see. Hear 
this word that comes through all the winds 
that blow through the ages, “ Blessed are the 
pure in heart: for they shall see God.” And 
sometimes the heart is the whole man; it is 
so in the first and great commandment of the 
law : “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy 
mind, and with all thy spirit ’”’—with all thy 
mind: the heart will recover the brain; the 
heart will go out after the prodigal intellect 
and bring it back. Some may only be doubters 
intellectually ; they are not doubters, but 
believers in the great necessities and sorest 
agonies of life. Then they suddenly change 
their creed, and remember that away down in 
the heart’s deepest places there lives not a 
creed, but a faith, a creating, redeeming God- 
appropriating faith, which is itself the very 
creation of divine grace. 

Yet again, in verse 17, “not unwise,” 
then the inevitable “ but ”—“‘ but understand- 
ing what the will of the Lord is.” Getting 
at the very centre of things; not living the 


174 THE EPISTLE TO 


little superficial life, but connecting the mind 
and the heart with the upper fountains and 
the ever-springing wells of the divine con- 
ception and the divine purpose. ‘“ Not un- 
wise’’; living from day to day; not seeing 
the connection of things, and not noticing 
that an increasing purpose runs through all 
the process of suns and stars, of all bodies 
solar, geologic, and other; not knowing that 
the whole conception is in the grip of God, 
that the Lord reigneth, that the fog is but for 
a moment, that the blue light of the ever- 
lasting morning will come, and in its glory 
we shall forget the night and cease to remem- 
ber that we were once troubled by a cloud. 

To what a great character does the Apostle 
call us in setting before us this series of not 
and but! He is talking as only a great 
spiritual statesman can talk. A passage like 
this is a great educational lesson to the soul. 
Everything is balanced, mutually related, and 
impregnated by the very spirit of humanity 
and of divinest love. To have read such a 
passage is to have incurred a great responsi- 
bility; how much greater does that responsi- 
bility become when we read the concluding 


THE EPHESIANS 175 


or climacteric “not” and “but” in the 
eighteenth verse !—‘‘ not drunk with wine... 
but ’’—the same style of argument—“ filled 
with the Spirit”: drunk with the Spirit, 
intoxicated and made enthusiastic by divine 
possession and inspiration. What insight 
into human nature! “Be not filled with 
wine, drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” 
Upon that excess we soon come. First there 
is exhilaration, and then there is a higher 
degree of buoyancy, and then there is a taste 
of bitterness, and then there is a sense of 
surfeit, and then a sense of revulsion, and an 
act of revulsion: you have reached the lmit 
of the wine; wine can go so far and no 
farther. But as to the Holy Spirit, be drunk 
with that Spirit, that holy wine ; be intoxi- 
cated and transported by that high revelry 
and that noblest ecstasy, in which there is no 
satiety, no excess, no surfeit; for the mind 
grows by what it feeds on, and our capacity 
to receive the Spirit enlarges as we bid Him 
_ welcome to the hospitality of our love. There 
is a whole volume of philosophy in that 
eighteenth verse. All limited things will sur- 
feit you, only the infinite will never cloy you. 


176 THE EPISTLE TO 


Why? Because you yourselves are meant to 
be immortal—you are intended to live with 
God, and in that life there is no monotony, 
no sense of weariness, but as we company 
with Christ we increase in desire to have 
further association still. I speak concerning 
Christ and His Church; no man can enter 
into this mystery but the man who lives and 
moves and has his being in God. He is never 
alone, he is never satiated; why, the water 
of Jacob’s well would not be enough for him 
—he would drink of it and thirst again; 
but he who drinks of the water that Jesus 
Christ gives, he who drinks of the Holy Spirit, 
shall never thirst, and never know the mean- 
ing of satiety, but will evermore call upon 
the Lord to increase his faith that he may at 
once increase his service and his joy. 

These are wonderful contrasts. Now we 
must go back a little upon our track here and 
there to pick out some peculiar words that 
seem to fit this mechanism of expression with 
exquisite adaptation. To quote a few of these 
remarkable words. Verse 9, ‘‘ The fruit of the 
Spirit ’—better translated, as it is in the 
Revised Version, ‘‘The fruit of light.” “Walk 


THE EPHESIANS 177 


as children of light,’ we read in verse 8; 
in verse 9 the Apostle adopts a connective 
or logical word, and says, “For (because) 
the fruit of light is in all goodness and 
righteousness and truth; showing us what 
is acceptable unto the Lord.” There is no 
more any darkness. The apple-trees will not 
respond to great masses of gloom and cloud ; 
there is no heroic little bird blithe enough to 
face the overpowering fog with even one little 
cheery note; no daisy or violet will come out 
to see the fog. But light makes all things 
come out—you cannot stop at home when it 
is light; light scatters and yet unites; light 
creates at once a common joy and a common 
sympathy, and people who never saw one 
another before are almost inclined to speak 
when the sun is doing its very best to make 
the earth merry and glad, as with a new song. 
So long as we remain in darkness we shall 
bear no fruit; when we come out by the 
power of the Spirit into light there will be 
bud and blossom and shaking fruit. May no 
blight or cruel wind from the east discourage 
such buddings and outbursts of the vernal 
juice | 
12 


ae 
* ue 


178 THE EPISTLE TO — 


And then we read in the eleventh verse 
of “the unfruitful works of darkness.” What 
did they all come to? When we were really 
bad men what did it come to when it was all 
totalled up in results? What did it come 
to? To loss of virility, to loss of reason, to 
paralysis of will, to the divestment of our 
best nature; it came to fear and trembling 
and self-accusation and beasthood—that is 
what it came to. ‘“‘ What fruit had ye then 
in those things whereof ye are now ashamed?” 
The bad man gets nothing. He thinks he 
makes a good bargain; he utters the fool’s 
laugh at the devil’s counter; and says what 
a wonderful arrangement he has made. And 
then come disappointment, social distrust, 
newspaper reports, halings before the courts ; 
and then there may come more wine, a deeper 
draught of the devil’s fluid to drown the 
devil’s accusations ; and then, when it is all 
added up, what does it come to? what is 
the bill? Hell! 

The Apostle urges us to walk as children 
of light, making his argument, in verse 13, 
run according to this line, ‘‘ whatsoever doth 
make manifest is light,” and light in three 


THE EPHESIANS 179 


points, light almost in three qualities: light 
at the centre, which illumines the whole 
man ; light that discovers, throws itself upon 
objects and discovers them. The sun dis- 
covers, not creates, the dust. You think the 
room has been well cared for; so it may have 
been: will you draw up the blind and let the 
sun be critic? And when he comes in with 
those eyes of light you are ashamed of the 
very room you were proud of an hour ago. 
And then there is a light that reflects—the 
mirror light, that throws back, so that you 
can see yourself in the light and abhor your- 
self, never before having seen your disfigure- 
ment and your unworthiness and your utter 
decrepitude and miserable infirmity. 

The Apostle gives the Ephesians a new 
word in verse 15: “See that ye walk cir- 
cumspectly.” It is a hard world to walk in 
at all. We need to have eyes in front and eyes 
behind and eyes on either side of us; because 
the enemy is watching us, and we are walking 
along a very narrow wall. On the top of that 
wall are sharp points of glass made as if in 
the cement, and we must walk very carefully 
or we shall be undone. We walk along a 


aD 


180 THE EPISTLE TO 


very narrow precipice, we cannot turn round 
to speak to a companion or fellow-traveller ; 


we say we must be perfectly silent till we get 


across this difficult place. Before you start 
on the journey look well round, be circum- 


spect—roundabout - lookers—exactly to see _ 


where you are and to what point you are 
moving. Do not live the careless life or the 
rootless life or the planless life, taking things 
just as they come and being unwise, and 
foolish with exceeding folly; but enter into 
calculation, relate one thing to another, and 
be wise in the Spirit of God, and let the word 
of Christ dwell in you richly that you may 
know how to answer the enemy, how to light 
a glory in the darkness, how to sing a song in 
the wilderness. 

“Redeeming the time.” The day of the 
Lord was always coming to Paul; the day of 
the Lord is always coming to us. We are to 
walk and work, to serve, to suffer, as if the 
day of the Lord would be to-morrow. He 
indicated a grand policy. He did not execute 
an arithmetical exercise ; he did not sit beside 
the ticking pendulum and say, “ Tell me when 
the Lord will come.” To that have we brought 


THE EPHESIANS 181 


our studies of the Scripture! whereas the 
Apostle indicates a grand policy. This was a 
favourite philosophy of his, to get hold of the 
policy, and let the details relate themselves 
'to it; and part of the Pauline policy was 
this, that the Lord may be expected at any 
moment. And there is no other wise way of 
living. Ye know not the hour that ye may 
know it: not to know it is to expect it, not 
to know it is to be solemnised by it. “The 
kingdom of heaven is at hand,” said He who 
began to preach, and then finished by dying 
that He might afterwards rise from the dead 
and show how near His kingdom is. But so 
slow of heart are we that we want to know 
days and hours; we have our slate and our 
pencil, and if a prophet but drop a word that 
is arithmetical, we take him down in a 
moment, and if an apostle should indicate 
anything like a day, we begin to calculate 
and put another figure to it. By figures you 
can prove everything; by figures you can 
prove nothing. It is very sad indeed that 
men who have slates and pencils gave many 
of us a sleepless week this month by looking 
for meteors that never came, so far as I am 


182 THE EPISTLE TO 


aware. Personally, I did not care whether 
they came or not, but there was a great 
‘inroad made upon my sleep. They might be 
there, and I ought to rise and see if they 
had come after all. Better redeem the time, 
better turn the sunshine into labour, better 
serve the Lord with simplicity and honesty 
and godly fear, and then we shall be ready 
for Him when He does come. Convinced am 
I that this is a policy of the Apostle, and not 
the indication of an arithmetical expectation. 
“Ye know not what hour your Lord cometh.” 
Christ Himself said so. “What I say unto 
one I say unto all, Watch.” The kingdom of 
heaven comes every moment to the man who 
wants it, and asks to see in the coming of his 
Lord the way to a new opportunity, to suffer 
bravely, to work wisely, and to serve with 
the gratitude and the grace of a spiritual 
obedience. 


Verses 19, 20: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms 
and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making 
melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks 
always for all things unto God and the Father in 
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 


Live the thankful life. Let us have no 


THE EPHESIANS 183 


more groaning and complaining, but let us 
have music and psalm and hymn and spiritual 
song, an inward and outward melody. The 
Church has forgotten all its exhortations to 
thankfulness and to music; it has made for 
itself a series of threnodies very depressing 
and soul-enslaving, services and tests of dis- 
cipline and standards of heartless and often 
hypocritical solemnity. The Apostle says, 
* Let us have no more of this; there is a 
sunny side even to Christian faith ; there are 
whole days, long bright summer days, in 
which it becomes us to sing one to another 
in psalm and hymn and spiritual song, and to 
match the summer with a human melody.” 
We are not the more pious because we are so 
depressed; melancholy is not one of the evi- 
dences of the Christian faith—as well refer 
to death in proof that we are members of the 
kingdom of heaven. We have nothing to do 
with death—it is abolished, sponged out; our 
subject is the resurrection. When the Church 
is more cheerful it will depose the world from 
many a position of social charm and fasci- 
nation to which it has no right whatsoever. 
_ Do we contribute towards a cheerful Church ? 


184 THE EPISTLE TO 


Did you ever know any church that was 
really rationally and consistently vivacious 
and triumphant because of the nearness of 
the Saviour and because the air was made 
balmy by His presence and blessing? Let a 
cheerful life be added to the evidences of the 
truth of the Christian religion. Paul was 
never ashamed of his overflowings of joy; 
he mingled the cup of life so dexterously 
and with so sweet and sacred a cunning that 
no man ever drank such a cup as Paul drank. 
He said, ‘‘ Yea, we glory in tribulations also.” 
Nothing could repress him or depress him; 
his religion forced its way through fog and 
smoke and storm and pain and loss; he took 
tribulation with a strong man’s hand, and 
added it to his wealth. ‘This is the victory 
that overcometh the world, even our faith.” 
Always hear the music that is in everything. 
There is fire in ice. There is music in silence; 
there is music in the radiance of the face. 
Music is not a noise; music is an expression, 
a spiritual emphasis, a force within which 
makes all outward things palpitate as if in 
obedience to some fascinating charm. It 
would be better for us to have psalm and 


THE EPHESIANS 185 


hymn and spiritual song than to have groan- 
ing and unbelief and fear and timidity. The 
heart should be so full of music as to leave 
no room for the devil. What the Apostle 
cautioned the Romans against was a void 
mind—a mind empty, idle, and either having 
nothing to do or being unwilling to do any- 
thing ; that is the devil’s chance! We hear 
a good deal about our temptations and diffi- 
culties and struggles. Silence! We want to 
hear something now about the psalm and 
hymn and spiritual song, and the triumph 
and domination in the infinite strength of the 
infinite grace. We are cautioned not to give 
way to depressing influences. Our singing 
spiritually with the right fervour and emphasis 
will keep the devil at bay. He hates all 
singing hearts; music tortures the damned 
spirit. If you had more music you would have 
less fear. Not mechanical music, not some- 
thing that can be taught at a certain number 
of pence per half-hour—that is not the music 
meant by the Apostle Paul; it is melody in 
the heart, it is the whole life itself turned to 
music. The devil does not get very near to 
the heart that lives in real thankfulness and 


186 THE EPISTLE TO 


in spiritual melody. When we live in argu- 
ment, he asks us questions; when we try 
to sustain the soul on controversy, he puts 
before us in a most skilful, almost professorial 
manner the heresies of old centuries, and 
asks us what we make of them; as if long 
ago we had not buried them, and lost 
them, and cursed them! You never should 
attempt to make an ancient heresy a modern 
difficulty. There are many temptations to 
depression. Some of those temptations arise 
from physical constitution. Some persons 
never can be otherwise than depressed ; 
other persons would really be unhappy if 
they had no depression—they would wonder 
what had taken place if they felt a little 
better one morning. These are not our 
living epistles and letters of commenda- 
tion. At the same time we are called upon 
to be patient with people who are consti- 
tutionally melancholy. We should never 
marry them; we should live as little as 
possible with them; but with these two 
reservations we should be as kind as we 
can be to them. 

If we have had our psalm and hymn and 





THE EPHESIANS 187 


spiritual song, what then, thou great disci- 
plinarian of the Church? ‘TI will tell you,” 
says Paul, “after the song must come the 
discipline.’ You will find all along the 
Christian line that song and discipline alter- 
nate—they seem to balance one another; in 
that, as in the record of Genesis, the evening 
balances the morning, and the evening and 
the morning are the whole day. Discipline 
succeeds melody : 


Verses 21, 22: “Submitting you:selves one to 
another in the fear of God. Wives, submit your- 
selves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” 


We shall miss the whole point of this if we 
take it out of its connection and make a jest 
of it. There are no jests in the Bible. The 
buffoon can find them on the altar, almost on 
the Cross, but the wise man finds no such 
thing. Observe the atmosphere in which the 
Apostle is now writing; take note of the 
atmosphere which he has created around 
these Gentile converts. Do not place the 
Ephesian converts on a level with Christian 
and experienced nations. When the tempera- 
ture is at the highest, when joy is at the zenith, 


188 THE EPISTLE TO 


when all the summer fruits are growing and 
all the summer birds are singing, he says, 
“Submit yourselves one to another in the fear 
of God.”? And in that atmosphere it is easy 
to do so; in any other atmosphere it is im- 
possible. That is the exposition. Where the 
atmosphere is right there will be no difficulty. 
What a cunning master of fence was this 
great brother of ours, the leader of the Christ- 
ian host! Said he, ‘‘Submitting yourselves 
one to another.” That is the key of all that 
follows. The submission is never to be on 
one side only ; and where there is submission 
on both sides there is no humiliation, there 
is sympathy, there is union. Everything de- 
pends upon the point at which we approach 
difficult subjects or severe trials. The diffi- 
culty is not so much in the thing itself as in 
the point from which we proceed towards it 
and the atmosphere with which we invest it. 
All things are affected by atmosphere. It is 
the atmosphere that makes the beauty of the 
summer day. The sun would be but a clumsy 
artist painting in white too dazzling if he had 
not the help of atmosphere; that is where 
he gets his pictures. And yet we call him the 


THE EPHESIANS 189 


ereat artist. In a sense he is the great artist, 
but he has wonderful appliances. God has 
given to him very great assistances and 
auxiliaries; he would be but a poor, glaring, 
white-faced thing, a merely frightsome thing, 
in yonder courts of his, if he were not at- 
tempered and coloured and toned by that 
which no man ever saw, the air, the atmo- 
sphere, the mysterious something that clothes 
the earth hke a garment, a garment invisible 
and yet full of a strange mystic colour. 

For example, many persons are broken 
down in mid-life and made cripples of for 
the rest of their days because of the great 
difficulty about ‘the miracles. There is no 
difficulty about the miracles. Yet you were 
broken down at thirty-five, and have never 
been yourself since, because some fool of a 
man suggested to you the difficulty of Jesus 
Christ walking on the sea, and raising the 
dead, and giving sight to the blind. That 
man made you a sort of initial, elementary, 
and most infantile infidel some thirty years 
ago. Would God some nobler spirit had been 
within your calling! The miracles; what 
are they? Everything depends upon the 


190 THE EPISTLE TO 


point of view from which they are surveyed, 
or the point in their own circumference at 
which they are broken in upon. Here and 
elsewhere the question is largely one of 
spiritual atmosphere. A poor little urchin 
brought up in a very depressing village, 
reared in a room seven feet by six, with a 
window in it so high that he was never able 
to look out of it, is brought up to see some 
great city; and how affrighted he is, how 
terrorstruck, how amazed! How will he 
ever get back again? Here is a youth 
brought up in a large city, educated upon 
a liberal scale, companying with persons of 
culture and travel and large information. 
How does he regard the city—even the city 
of London? Without fear; with apprecia- 
tion. He has come down upon it from a high 
point; the other visitor struggled up to it 
from the lowest possible point. Do these 
people view the city in the same light, and 
estimate it at the same value? Certainly 
not. They are two different people; they 
approach it from two totally different points 
of view. So if I come down from long 
companying with the Saviour in heaven; 


THE EPHESIANS 191 


if I have spent with Him forty days and 
forty nights; if we have held long, sweet, 
deep, vital intercourse, I come down upon 
the world, and it is but a pebble-lfe; I 
come down upon its wonders, and do not 
consider them worth looking at. I have been 
with the Lord, and everything else must be 
mean, small, contemptible. If I have made 
myself, by grace and the holy action of the 
blessed Spirit, familiar with the purposes of 
Ckrist, I shall approach the miracles of 
Christ as very little things, as He Himself 
approached them. ‘They were never great 
efforts to Jesus Christ; He came from 
eternity, and time can never be great to 
immortality. Jesus Christ said concerning 
His miracles, in addressing His disciples, 
“Greater works than these shall ye do, 
because I go unto the Father: the farther 
I am from you, the nearer I am to you; 
the leverage will be greater ; all the apparatus 
and appliances, spiritual and metaphysical, 
will be more immediately under My com- 
mand; I go that I may come; I vanish that 
I may be seen by the heart.” 

So with this matter of submission. ‘* Sub- 


192 THE EPISTLE TO 


mitting yourselves one to another.” A man 
takes refuge in his vanity, in self-exaggera- 
tion, in overweening and overwhelming self- 
importance. How do you account for that? 
Because he has come from a low communion. 
He has struggled up to this position; he 
has not come down upon it, as an eagle 
might alight upon a rock; so he asks why 
he should submit—he! Was ever little 
pronoun so loaded with false emphasis, so 
crushed by misinterpretation ? He—a candle 
that wind can blow out; he—a leaf that 
will fall with the winter wind blowing upon 
it ; he—whose breath is in his nostrils ; he— 
upon whose brain a cloud may descend at 
any moment, and he will grope at midday 
as if it were sevenfold night! He must 
approach himself from the right standpoint, 
he must come to himself from communion 
with God, and then he will understand what 
Jesus, the ever-blessed One, meant when He 
said, “ He that is greatest amongst you, let 
him be the servant of all.” That is sub- 
mission. Service is submission—help given 
to others out of a generous, because regene- 
rated, heart is the sign and is the seal of a 


a 
nie 


THE EPHESIANS 193 


genuine submission. What is this wonderful 
submission? It is two persons doing the 
same thing at the same time to one another. 
Where is the submission? These acts are 
not consequent one upon another; they are 
concurrent. You bowed just as I was 
bowing, I submitted just as you submitted, 
and the finest mechanical or mathematical 
instrument ever discovered could not mark 
the point of coincidence. That is submission. 
There is nothing here of some high and 
mighty one waiting until some lowly and 
inferior one kisses his boots; there is no 
act of condescension on the part of some 
foolish person who does not understand him- 
self or understand the discipline of life ; there 
is no knavish trick in this. Observe the 
atmosphere in which we have been trained. 
We have been brought up to being filled with 
the Spirit, to singing with one another in 
hymn, psalm, and spiritual song, as unto the 
Lord; we have been taught to give thanks 
always for all things, unto God and the 
Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ ; 
then “submitting’”—part of the psalm! 
It may be the closing note of the rolling, 
13 


+ 7 
.* % 


~ 


194 THE EPISTLE TO 


the sonorous anthem. But we delight to 


tear these little sentences out of their place 
and to found theories upon them, so that 
some poor miserable preacher, of whom his 
mother might be ashamed, claims to be the 
head of the wife; a man who can hardly 
get out of bed in the morning; a man 
who has great difficulty in making bread 
enough to sustain his wife and family; a 
little, miserable, poorly-made toy of a man 
who is the head of the wife because he could 
not make himself the head of anything else! 
That is not Christian teaching. The two 
are one; they submit themselves one to the 
other. How to be first in the act of sub- 
mission is the great problem, the happy, 
delightful enigma, which both the parties, if 
filled with the Spirit of Christ, can instantly 
and sufficiently answer and resolve. 

You cannot lay down little rules upon 
any such matters of personal or household 
discipline. What, then, can we do? The 
Apostle has already told us: “ Be filled with 
the Spirit.” To rule without ruling, to lead 
without leading, to drive without cracking 
the whip, to be a man without being a fool— 


THE EPHESIANS 195 


that is only possible when we are filled with 
the Spirit, when we are breathing the vital 
atmosphere, when we are one with Christ. 
There is a sovereign principle which simplifies 
and sanctifies the whole action, redeeming 
it from servility, and lifting it up into a 
sacrament. What is that sovereign prin- 
ciple? Again and again it asserts itself in 
all these exhortations—‘‘as unto the Lord,” 
*‘as Christ,” “even as the Lord of the 
Church.” Christians, whether men or women, 
are never asked to do more than Christ did. 
That will solve everything. ‘Even as the 
Lord.” Then, again, ‘as Christ,” and again, 
“as unto the Lord.” It is not some little 
domestic claim; it is a living Christian 
principle. Does the wife do nothing, even 
for the most successful of men? She makes 
the income quite as much as he does; she 
sustains him, inspires him, lifts the burden 
from his shoulder, takes him to see some 
new vision, drops into his life some new note 
of music. I would not have a penny that 
my wife did not share and could not spend. 
She made it. I, a poor creature easily de- 
pressed and turned out of the way, whose 


196 THE EPISTLE TO 


only delight is that he can resign his position ; 
and she, cheering, gladdening, inspiring, up- 
lifting. To whom does the property belong ? 
Toher. When I tolda certain half-grown old 
gentleman that my wife drew all the cheques 
without consulting me or troubling me about 
such documents, he said, *‘ You must have 
great confidence in your wife.” The wretch |! 
“Confidence in your wife!” What a life 
without her! A nightmare—an awful, intoler- 
able misery. But these things cannot be 
regulated by little laws and maxims. How, 
then, can they be regulated? I quote again 
the wholly sufficient answer, “ Be filled with 
the Spirit, the Spirit of love.” Love never 
thinks that anything has been given whilst 
anything has been withheld. Until, there- 
fore, we are great in the Christian life, 
great in the conception of spiritual bless- 
ings in Christ Jesus, foreordained by the 
discriminating and loving wisdom of God, 
settled, rooted, grounded in Christ, we are 
not fit to have a house, we are not fit to 
handle the delicate and difficult problem of 
life. But if the word of Christ be in us 
and dwell richly in us, there will be no 


THE EPHESIANS 197 


difficulty ; there will be music, there will 
be rest; and we shall say, poor man or 
great man, “ Be it ever so humble, there is 
no place like home.” 


Verses 23-33: “For the husband is the head of 
the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: 
and He is the saviour of the body. ‘Therefore as 
the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives 
be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, 
love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, 
and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify 
and cleanse it with the washing of water by the 
word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious 
church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such 
thing; but that it should be holy and without | 
blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their 
own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 
For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but 
nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the 
church : for we are members of His body, of His 
flesh, and of His bones. For this cause shall a man 
leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto 
his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is 
a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and 
the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in 
particular so love his wife even as himself; and the 
wite see that she reverence her husband.” 


It is a marvellous and beautiful thing that 
even the Apostle Paul sometimes stood back 
and said, “I am not quite sure about this, but 
I think I have the mind of the Lord. I do not 
put too much stress upon what I am now 


198 THE EPISTLE TO 


writing to you; I take up this position with 
some timidity, certainly with some caution. 
The subject is infinitely delicate ; I will give 
you my own mind upon it. I do not speak by 
commandment, but I think I have the mind 
of the Lord. At all events, this is how the 
case strikes me.” That is the teacher to 
believe in. Never believe in the man who 
knows everything ; have great confidence in 
any teacher, lecturer, professor, preacher, who 
says, ‘Now at this point I am as weak as 
other men, but I will tell you how this most 
difficult subject presents itself to my mind 
at this moment.” Paul has been using the 
greatest words: spiritual blessings in Christ 
Jesus; eternal purpose which he purposed in 
Christ Jesus our Lord; the fellowship of the 
mystery ; the riches of His glory. Oh, I am 
lost in these ineffable mysteries! Then he 
comes out from these inner sanctuaries, and 
says, “I have a doctrine that you can perhaps 
better understand and apply: wives, husbands, 
children, servants, masters, I have a word to 
say to you.” Paul was the man to say it; he 
came from the right school. He came from the 
university of the divine communion. He had 


THE EPHESIANS 199 


companied long with the living God; and 
having stepped, so to say, forth out of the 
sanctuary that is covered with golden clouds, 
he said, “‘ The application of all these marvel- 
lous visions with which my soul has been 
delighted is this: wives, husbands, children, 
servants, masters, this is the meaning of it 
all, so far as you are immediately concerned 
and related.’”” We have already seen that 
we can only understand these things in the 
degree in which we have been happily affected 
by the atmosphere under which and within 
which they were spoken by this the leader 
and the chief of the Apostles. He has just, 
in our own hearing, so to say, called himself 
the least of the Apostles. Do not presume too 
much upon that. Paul could suddenly break 
away at many unexpected points, and startle 
those who thought they could take some liber- 
ties with him. Never take liberties with the 
Apostle Paul. 

There is one grand principle running 
through all these instructions and exhorta- 
tions about wives, husbands, children, ser- 
vants, masters—and that great principle may 
be represented by these three words, ‘‘ even as 


200 THE EPISTLE TO 


Christ.” Do not dwell upon the little circum- 
stances, the transient occasions, the change- 
able conditions of the text, but get at the 
central and eternal principle— ‘even as 
Christ.”” Wife and husband, child and parent, 
master and servant, are only to be treated 
upon this great holy ground—other ground 
there is none. You can make a livelihood by 
inventing other programmes, but the fire will 
devour them, and the ashes will be nothing 
worth. ‘ Even as Christ.’’ ‘‘ Even as Christ 
loved the church.” Even as Christ loved the 
Father, so are those who are in Christ to love 
one another. No man can teach us that; we 
should be in the position of those who dispute 
with equals. There must be a sovereign voice 
in this matter. We shall know that voice 
when we hear it; it comes with authority, 
because it comes from eternity. Whenever 
the Apostle Paul, therefore, visits our families, 
he says, “‘ Order everything even as Christ.” 
No man or woman is expected to love more 
than Christ loved ; to obey more than Christ 
obeyed; to stoop lower than He stooped when 
He took the towel and washed the feet of men 
who were unworthy. Why all these little 


THE EPHESIANS 201 


disputes about supremacy and priority and 
dignity and official elevation and the unutter- 
able insanity of selfishness? The great 
philosophy of the whole scheme of the 
commonwealth is “even as Christ.” That 
is the right bond of society. Other bond 
there is none to be relied upon; other bonds 
come and go like changing fashions in rings 
and colours. ‘The eternal bond is “even as 
Christ.” 

He makes application of these words to the 
great subject of marriage. What poor notions 
many people have of the married life! They 
think that the priest marries them. Poor 
priest! many charges are laid at his door, but 
never lay the charge at any priest’s door that 
he married you. He performed a ceremony, 
he discharged a legal duty, he had a fee for 
doing the least possible thing that could be 
done in the time; but marry you—no man 
can do that. You must redefine the word 
“marriage.” It has become a market-place 
word—a word to jest at. It is a deep word, 
full of meaning, full of holy significance ; it 
is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our 
eyes. He marries all couples that are marricd. 


202 THE EPISTLE TO 


I do not say all couples that are legally 
united, all couples that have a kind of legal 
lien upon one another; but all souls that are 
married the Lord has married. In that sense 
marriage is the sacrament of life, the great 
holy oath that binds souls into blessed unity. 
There are people, so amazingly small as hardly 
to be worth counting in the census, who some- 
times want to know where they would like 
to be married. Hence the great religious 
ordinance has been degraded. They will be 
married here because it is near, there because 
it is fashionable, yonder because many people 
will be likely to see them, or at another 
place where they can be married for nothing. 
These are the fools that hurt the sacraments, 
that degrade the Church, that make the devil 
laugh! Marriage is an affair of the soul: 
two souls meeting without appointment ;— 
meeting in a way that creates the great 
surprises of life; meeting as Moses met the 
burning bush. He did not meet it by ap- 
pointment; he met it, and wondered, and 
approached, and heard, and stood forth the 
leader of the hosts of the Lord. Man is per- 
haps more peculiar than any other biped; he 


THE EPHESIANS 203 


has a wonderful knack of making words that 
fit his non-religious moods. Do you know 
that it is a great thing not to be religious ? 
Do you know that all the great men never go 
to church ? Are you aware of that astounding 
fact ? What poor creatures we must be to be 
in church! How do they treat this great 
mystery of marriage? They have scientific 
terms—and what is life without polysyllables ? 
They speak of natural affinity. That does not 
sound very comforting. They speak of the 
survival of the fittest. An excellent doctrine 
for the fittest! They will not speak in Biblical 
terms of any great sacrament of life. The 
Apostle Paul spoke of these great sacraments, 
and he spoke of them in a language I prefer. 
I have the two phrases before me—“ natural 
affinity, survival of the fittest”; and I have 
the Apostle’s grander words, and I deliber- 
ately, solemnly, and gratefully adopt the 
language of the Apostle. He says, “‘ Predesti- 
nated, elect before the foundation of the 
world”; and Christ said, ‘‘ From the begin- 
ning, from the plasm of things, when the 
universe was less than a film in the purpose 
of God.” From that point all these things 


204 THE EPISTLE TO 


were settled. But man likes to think that he 
invented the words “natural affinity.” Pro- 
fessor Huxley did most frankly acknowledge 
that he was the inventor of the word “agnosti- 
cism.”’ Most of us have Greek enough to have 
made that word, and many of us have sense 
enough not to have done so. Do not dispute 
lightly the words of the Bible; they are the 
right words, so far as I can discover. I have 
gone through all the intellectual bazaars that 
were open to me, and I have looked upon 
the terms marked in plain figures, and I 
have never bought one of them—I have 
enough in the ancient museum of the 
Bible. ‘‘ Elect according to the foreknow- 
ledge of God”; predestinated, called, chosen— 
these are better words; there is more music 
in them; they appeal to something that is 
already in the heart. That is the solution 
of the problem of marriage; not of legal 
marriage, not of something that is done 
merely in a civil and political way: I am 
not using the word ‘‘ marriage” in any of 
its lighter or more frivolous senses—I am 
speaking of marriage as expressing the 
predestined policy of God before the world 


THE EPHESIANS 205 


began. If you are married, you were married 
in eternity; if you are mismarried, it was 
not the Lord’s doing, it was yourself, your 
lust, your covetousness, your selfishness, 
your narrow-sightedness. But if you are 
married in the real deep sense, you were 
married before the foundation of the world. 
This is a great mystery, but I speak 
concerning Christ and the Church. 

Thus we revert to the great principle, 
the central, philosophical, and governing 
principle—*‘ even as Christ.” When we get 
into this region of things we shed off all 
little peddling questions about who is first 
and who is second, and who is superior 
and who is inferior. Let the dogs bark out 
that question if they care to do so. Paul 
was too wise to discuss it; and men and 
women called of God and bathed in the 
love of Christ have higher questions and 
have sublimer themes. Who is the greater ? 
Both. Is not that bad grammar? Very 
bad grammar, but excellent truth. Who is 
to submit first? Both at the same time— 
“Submitting yourselves one to another”: 
as we have just said, both doing the same 


thing at the same time in the same spirit. 
Who shall do it first? Both! You must live 
these great mysteries; the pedagogue cannot 
explain them by his book, though it be 
illumined by a candle. You will understand 
by the simplest illustration what is meant 
by the climatic influence of atmosphere, 
even in the higher reaches of life. Let us 
put the case thus. Did this fruit grow in 
England? It is very excellent—is it of 
English culture? “No” is the immediate 
reply. Why not? ‘The climate of England 
could not, at this season of the year, grow 
fruit of this succulence and richness; you 
never saw this bloom under England’s cold 
grey skies. Were these flowers grown out-of- 
doors? No; they were grown in a special 
place under special conditions ; they express 
a certain temperature of warmth, they are 
children of the warm air. Could they not 
have grown out-of-doors? No. Exactly 
so is it with the higher qualities and 
excellencies of the spiritual life. You 
cannot grow them in the open air, in the 
wintry time; they are grown in the garden 
of God. You understan@ the parable? The 


206 THE EPISTLE TO 


THE EPHESIANS 207 


finest excellencies of life cannot be grown 
outside the greatest Christian temple; they 
are right beautiful, and they are most 
luscious and cherishing, but they were never 
grown in coldness, in chilling rain, in 
freezing snow. It is even so with the great 
Christian virtues, fruits of the Spirit, as 
they are detailed in the great Epistle of 
Paul. They are in very deed fruits of the 
Spirit, flowers grown in the tropics of His 
love. There are persons who come to show 
you some poor half-withered weazened- 
looking apples, the best that can be grown 
in such soil at such season. Quite right; 
but do not let them pretend to be products 
of the tropics, do not let them attempt to 
put aside the great luscious fruits which 
represent summer at its best. That is the 
difference between your little socialities, and 
small programmes, and crippled attempts to 
do something for society under red banners 
and under the tuck of drums. If you would 
have right, justice, love, peace, unity, you 
must conduct your society on this principle, 
“even as Christ.” 

People who can see all this from the Covent 


208 THE EPISTLE TO 


Garden point of view can never see it from 
a religious point of view. The worst of these 
crab-apple productions is that just by the 
time you have got to digest them in some 
poor degree, aided by a small army of doctors, 
the persons who grew the crabs come and look 
over your garden wall, and say, “ Don’t eat 
them, because they are not good for you!” 
Men do not stand to their own crab-apples, 
but they sell them to you to-morrow, and 
then tell you the day after that you ought 
not to have bought them. What is to be 
done? If society is to be saved, it can only 
be saved on the principle, ‘‘ even as Christ.” 
There you have righteousness, love, mercy, 
justice, pity, help, balm in Gilead, and a 
Physician that makes Gilead famous. You 
can sooner create a new astronomy than you 
can create a new socialism. Socialism is not 
left in our hands. Society is as truly the 
creation of God as is the solar system, and 
we have no right to interfere with it; inter- 
ference is meddlesomeness, and meddlesome- 
ness never comes to any good. You can 
touch the case at the point of accident, or at 
some lower level; here and there incidentally 


THE EPHESIANS 209 


you may do something that is not other than 
praiseworthy ; but as to the solar system, it 
wants none of our patronage and none of our 
mechanism. And the socialism of God is as 
independent as His astronomy. I will tell 
you what I think perhaps we might first do, 
and after that do something else. I suggest 
that we should here and now as it were 
resolve ourselves into a committee to bring 
the tropics into England. I have a definite 
proposition to make, and that is that we 
endeavour to create the tropics by lighting 
more candles. I have not patented the idea, 
and you are welcome to it. We could make 
the place warmer if we lighted two more 
candles, or two hundred more candles. How 
does it feel now with regard to tropical 
warmth? Have we produced any effect upon 
the grass? does it look fatter and greener 
and stouter? Light two hundred more, 
and two thousand more. Now how do 
things look from a tropical point of view ? 
Suppose we light a million more? Do 
candles make tropics? That is what people 
are trying to do without Christ, without 
the Book of God, without the sanctuary, by 
14 








rf 


programmes, new schemes, den 
popular excitements, and BS o 


“« Kven as Christ.” 


CHAPTER VI 


Verses 1-9: “Children, obey your parents in the 
Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and 
mother; which is the first commandment with 
promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou 
mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, 
provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them 
up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters 
according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in 
singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with 
eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of 
Christ, doing the will of God from the heart ; with 
good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to 
men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man 
doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether 
he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same 
things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing 
that your Master also is in heaven ; neither is there 
respect of persons with Him.” 


“ (NHILDREN.” What is the meaning 


of the word “children”? Is it 


possible that there can be nine different 
meanings to the word “child” in Holy 
Scripture? That is certainly so, and our 
poor English only enables us to render the 


211 


212 THE EPISTLE TO 


word by the one term, “child,” and that 
solitary term, “child,” we know next to 
nothing about. Hence the little carping 
criticism with which the Apostle is favoured 
by persons who ought to hold their tongues 
upon religious subjects, and possibly upon 
all other subjects. ‘ Obey.” We always 
associate some idea of discipline—perhaps 
also some idea of servility—with this word 
“obey.” Is it possible that there are five 
different words rendered in the New Testa- 
ment ‘‘obey”’? that the five different words 
vary in grade and colour and emphasis? 
That is actually so as a matter of mere 
grammar, and yet we have but this poor 
little vessel named “‘ obey’ in which to carry 
away the water of life or the wine of God’s 
love. And yet the Englishman is prone to 
think that there is only one wise tongue 
among all the nations and kindreds and 
peoples and tongues of the earth. ‘“ Obey”: 
literally, “listen to.” Attention is the first 
element in obedience; to listen well is the 
beginning of a good reply. But few men 
can listen; hence the expression, ‘ He that 
hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ Every 


THE EPHESIANS 213 


man has ears, but not necessarily to hear. 
We cannot too strongly impress upon our 
own minds the fact that very few men have 
cultivated the art and faculty—shall we say 
the science and wisdom ?—of listening. Yet 
every man thinks he can hear. Hearing is 
only possible to the wise; hearing is not the 
same thing in any two instances; hearing 
means an attitude of the soul, a specific 
and high degree of attention, that the very 
last letter of a word may be heard. There 
must be no clipping, no shortening; we 
must hear the last, even dying, cadence of 
the musical counsel or exhortation. This is 
a great art, and few men have taken a 
superior degree in it, though every man 
thinks that he can hear; whereas he is 
mentally interrupting the speaker, and if 
he could audibly interrupt him he would. 
He never gives the speaker an opportunity 
of being heard absolutely ; he replies before 
the sentence is finished. It is a beautiful 
little lesson, therefore, which the Apostle 
would send to the children: “ Listen, listen, 
listen; and not until father or mother is 
really done attempt to say anything in reply, 


214 THE EPISTLE TO 


and learn as soon as you can that the less 
you say in reply the better.” 

We have, therefore, as our great subject 
religion in the family. The question may 
be thrown into some such form as this: 
Here is a family; what would religion do— 
that is to say, the religion of our Lord Jesus 
Christ—if it were to be carried out in letter 
and in spirit within the four corners of the 
household? That is an interesting inquiry. 
The Apostle does not pick out any particular 
room or chamber or section of the house; 
he has the husband and the wife, and the 
parent and the child, and the servant and 
the master; and he has a religion that he 
thinks at least is adapted to every one of 
them, whatever the case may be. It is very 
like the grandeur of Christ’s evangel; he 
has no little secrets for special persons, no 
small conceptions which only favourite in- 
tellects can receive. He says in all things, 
“Go ye into all the world and preach the 
gospel to every creature.’ What is the 
Apostle doing to guarantee the spirit of 
this blessed injunction? When he comes 
to husband and wife, and parent and child, 


THE EPHESIANS 215 


and master and servant, he is in very deed 
preaching to every creature. Are there any 
more creatures in the world than those 
named or implied by the terms of the text? 
Probably there is not one. If, therefore, we 
can profitably study these injunctions, we 
may get a philosophy that will cover the 
training of the world, and that philosophy 
you can get nowhere else. I challenge the 
enemy; I challenge him by holding him in 
contempt. Let there be no misreading of 
these wonderful words. Every one of these 
injunctions could be spoiled by false emphasis. 
A man could so preach on this text as to 
take out of it all the light and all the music, 
and leave behind nothing but a mocking 
emptiness. It is so with many of the so- 
called commands and threatenings of the 
Scripture. There are no commands in any 
merely arbitrary and mechanical sense. And 
God never threatens, in our little, peevish, 
contemptible sense of threatening, holding a 
rod before a man or a dog, and saying, in 
effect, ‘I am stronger than you, and I will 
beat you if you do not comply with my 
wish, and do it instantaneously.” We must 


216 THE EPISTLE TO 


get rid of such criticism of divine words, 
or we shall never understand the holy and 
beautiful Book. When the Lord said, “In 
the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt 
surely die,” He was not threatening Adam. 
“Threatening ” is a word then unknown ; there 
had been nothing of threatening. The words 
convey a gracious, tender warning; they ex- 
press a yearning solicitude for the good of 
the creature: as who should say, “I warn 
you because I love you. This tree must be 
just where it is; why it must so be you 
will understand long ages hence. It will be 
in every man, in every moral and responsible 
creature. Do not touch that specified and 
peculiar tree, because if you do you will 
lose your manhood, you will forfeit your 
crown of dominion which I have just given 
to you over the beasts of the field and the 
fowls of the air, and whatsoever passeth 
through the deeps of the sea.” It is not a 
threatening, it is not a lordling playing tricks 
with some poor, ignorant, half-developed 
creature; it is brooding, yearning, redeeming 
love, as will be proved as the ages come 
and go and unload their gospels in the 


THE EPHESIANS 217 


sanctuaries of time. We could read ‘‘Children, 
obey your parents” in a pedagogue’s tone, 
in a tone of alarm, and in a tone of affected 
and arbitrary or momentary superiority. We 
could so read it as a kindly, loving exhorta- 
tion ; and that it is not a threatening in the 
narrow sense of the word is proved by two 
facts—first, that Paul gives a reason for the 
exhortation, and, secondly, attaches a promise 
to its obedience. 

What is the reasonP “ For this is right.” 
He says it in a most noble tone; he wishes 
the young hearts to whom the admonition 
is addressed to build according to geometry, 
to have the square and the plomb and the 
compasses without which you cannot build 
anything. You may unload carts filled with 
bricks, but you build nothing until you enter 
the great temple of geometry and go to the 
altar of the square and the plomb and the com- 
passes, and then say how you will handle the 
load of unrelated bricks, or stones, or other 
building material. It is as if the Apostle had 
said, “This is geometry—moral geometry, 
spiritual geometry ; unless you build accord- 
ing to the action of the stars, you build 


218 THE EPISTLE TO 


nothing, you are busy in idling, you are 
energetic and fussy in doing nothing or 
in savagely and insanely attempting the 
impossible. Every man must have a Bible. 
It may not be my Bible, my mother’s Bible, 
the sweet book I live upon, the honeycomb 
sweeter than all other sweetness; yet every 
man, atheist as well as theist, must have a 
Bible, and a Bible of authority, if he would 
do anything really constructive and endurable 
in life. Here is the Euclid of the moral 
geometry—“ for this is right’: tested by the 
plomb line, tested by the square, tested 
by the compasses. Put one foot of the com- 
passes on the centre, touch the cireumference 
with the other, and say whether that circum- 
ference be a circle or only a rough polygon. 
You must have tests and standards and 
authorities, however much you may jeer at 
them or hold them in unreasoning contempt. 
Euclid in four words, Euclid with all his 
definitions and axioms and theorems and 
demonstrations in four words: do it because 
it is right. And right always ends in a bene- 
diction ; nay, benediction is the very soul of 
right. No man can do right without sleeping 


THE EPHESIANS 219 


well, without ease of mind, without a growing 
sense of enlarging freedom and expanding 
and deepening fellowship with God and things 
eternal. 

Then there is a promise as well as a reason— 
“That it may be well with thee, and thou 
mayest live long on the earth.” That is the 
earliest notion of eternity. It was big enough 
for the time; we needed the patriarchs to 
show that there is nothing in mere duration 
of ages. It is mournful reading to read about 
the patriarchs and the men of high antiquity, 
because after they lived six hundred and fifty 
years they died, and after they had lived eight 
hundred and twenty and nine years they 
died; and after Methuselah came to his 
climacteric age he died. Death waits long 
for some people, but he always conquers in 
his own sphere: it is a measurable sphere, 
and a sphere we may sometimes mock at in 
relation to other and greater spheres, but 
time always conquers even Hercules and 
Methuselah. But time was so used alge- 
braically and symbolically as to point to the 
unknown quantity called Immortality. That 
would have been too long a word for the very 


220 THE EPISTLE TO 


first ages of the world—it would not have 
been understood at all; so the Lord must 
begin by promising that a man shall live 
twenty years, and two hundred years, and three 
hundred years, and until hundreds become 
almost a thousand. What is the Lord doing 
with all this variety of day and century and 
age? He is endeavouring by condescending 
methods to awaken the human mind into 
a dawning conception of the everlasting, 
immortality. There will arise a man in the 
after ages who will speak about an awakening 
trump, about an anastasis, a rising from the 
power of death and the grave, and a going forth 
in white robes to possess and enjoy eternity. 
In the meantime, here is a promise to be 
living upon. Thus God has schooled us and 
educated us; He has given a promise for 
the day, an assurance exactly needed for the 
passing necessity or the transient occasion. 
The little child is pleased to think that it 
may by good conduct and by strict regu- 
lation of diet live until it is a hundred years 
old. Dear little heart, sweet little soul, that 
is all it can at present take into its opening 
mind of the conception of the eternal. Ages 





THE EPHESIANS 221 


will come when we shall not reckon our 
growth by mere centuries, but by milleniums 
and sons endless. As a matter of fact, how- 
ever, and exactly suited to the school period 
of life, it will be well with us in proportion 
as we listen to those who have the right 
and the ability to teach. It will go well with 
us if we act rightly. What is “well”? 
That is a little word, but it holds all the 
blessings—it means rest, and joy, and hope, 
and sweet content, and a mastery over diffi- 
culties, and a grand capacity for taking 
environments, so-called, and wringing their 
necks and throwing them into the ditch. It 
can only be well with a man when it is well 
with his soul, when he is right with God, 
when he listens, saying, day by day, “ Speak, 
Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” Then shall 
the day’s work be hard indeed in many a 
case, but always will result in a good con- 
science and in a deep and well-deserved sleep. 

What applies to the child applies also to 
husband and wife. We cannot order people 
to submit, and we cannot command people 
to love; we must therefore go elsewhere for 
the meaning of these words. In a very 


222 THE EPISTLE TO q 


narrow and superficial sense we may by 
sheer strength of muscle make some weaker 
man or woman submit or go under. That 
is not the meaning of the Apostle; that 
could not be the meaning of such a writer. 
We must go deeper. If you have overcome 
a nation by sheer force of military strength, 
you may make that nation, in a certain 
arbitrary sense, submit to you; but as soon 
as that nation has had time to grow a 
further muscle, it will take hold of your 
throat and make you submit. There is only 
one way of conquering men, women, children, 
nations, and that is by reason, by love, by 
righteousness, by reciprocity of manhood, 
the continual interchange of all that is best 
in thought, in imagination, in considerate- 
ness, in love, and in other Christlike and 
Godlike qualities. Do you suppose that 
you can make anybody obey you simply 
because you have the stronger arm? You 
may even report in the public prints that 
you have achieved a great victory. What 
by? By the sword? Never! There is only 
one victory, and that is the victory that is 
moral, spiritual, rational, filled with the 


THE EPHESIANS 223 


Spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of re- 
deeming love. In that way you may kill 
your enemies, and kill them into friendship— 
kill them, so to say, by kindness and into 
love. That nation is only strong in the 
degree in which it is morally mighty; that 
household rule is only beautiful and suffi- 
cient and good in the degree in which 
nobody is conscious of living under, in a 
servile sense, anybody else. He leads best 
who never seems to lead. We want to see 
our leaders; and we want to see God, and 
we cannot see Him. He leads who does not 
appear to lead. Sight of him would lead 
to disobedience or to criticism, or to a 
vexatious mental turbulence. That is true 
leading that never shows the leader. 

In all these cases of submission and 
obedience observe the rule is ‘in Christ, 
pleasing Christ.” 

Now with regard to the parents, under- 
stand that the parents are restrained: 
“Ye fathers, provoke not your children to 
wrath.” Never make your children your 
enemies, and never rule them too much. A 
parent should never, if he can possibly help 





224 THE EPISTLE TO 


it, make a fool of himself. He will be the 
best parent who is the companion of his 
children, who may sometimes, after five- 
and-twenty years of age, be almost mistaken 
for one of his own boys. They have lived 
together so joyously, happily, co-operatively, 
that kindly observation and criticism might 
sometimes inquire, Now what is the relation 
between these men, and if the one of them 
is the father, which is it? Many people 
have ruined their influence in their family 
by being much too big and much too 
conscious that there is no chair in the 
house big enough for their enthronement. 
But this cometh forth from the Lord of 
hosts—this science of the household life, this 
art and simplicity of artlessness and of 
wisdom. We can so live as to make obedi- 
ence a delight and to make disobedience a 
positive pain to ourselves. There may be 
few only who know, this, but it is known 
by some, that to do anything but the parental 
will would be a conscious self-contempt 
and self-punishment. The parental will has 
been proved so often to be “in the Lord,” 
and “as Christ,’ and according to the very 


THE EPHESIANS 225 


Spirit of Christ, that to deny it or resist 
it would be an immediate and intolerable 
penalty. Blessed are they in whose houses 
there runs this spirit of mutual and recipro- 
cal obedience and unity, saying, “Servants, 
be obedient to them that are your masters 
according to the flesh . .. Masters, forbear 
threatening; knowing that your Master also 
is in heaven ”’—emphatically, according to 
the language of Paul, knowing that your 
Master, as well as theirs, the Master being 
the same, is in heaven. 

Now in all these relations there are one 
or two unchangeable points. First of all, 
the child can never be so old as the parent 
so long as they are both living. That is 
not a commonplace, nor is it a paradox; it 
is a philosophy. So long as they are both 
living they owe the same duty one to another, 
according to the degrees of experience and 
education through which they have both 
passed. The son may sometimes be wiser than 
the father: I have heard so; I do not always 
or necessarily believe it. The son believes it 
—no wonder; but if any man is so educated 
or schooled in academy or university as to 

15 


rai. 
rt 
a 


226 THE EPISTLE TO 


mock his own father’s ignorance, he has 
been schooled in the wrong way, and his 
university may have conferred a degree 
upon him, but it has not made him a wise 
and honourable man. He is most educated 
and best educated who is most forbearing 
with the disadvantages under which his 
forefathers were doomed to live. They had 
no schools according to the modern definition 
of that term; they went to work when they 
were ten years old, or twelve, or fourteen ; 
they had to gather what they could from 
dimly lighted night schools. But they were 
faithful to their opportunities, and they saved 
enough to put their sons to better schools, 
and even to universities; and it would be a 
sevenfold shame never to be forgiven if those 
sons, owing themselves to their fathers’ self- 
denial, should turn upon their fathers and 
rend them for want of education. 

As to the master and the servant, these 
relations can never be changed. There will 
always be masters, and there will always be 
servants. It is none of our doing—it is a law 
from the beginning; and if it be properly 
accepted and properly worked out, it is a 


of 


E 


THE EPHESIANS 227 


beneficent law. Relations may be ameliorated, 
may be modified, may be adapted to new 
circumstances, and every Christian would 
wish them so to be; but big and little we 
shall always have, great men and half-made 
men we shall probably have until the end 
of time. The great mischief is that a man 
should take a false view of work, of labour, 
and imagine that some other man has got 
the pre-eminence because he had good luck 
on his side. There is no good luck. I go 
back to the eternal counsel, and I find 
there the plan of life and the specification 
all drawn up; and if I could but accept 
what God has given me and make the most 
of it, and try honestly and legitimately to 
double it, I should be as happy as any lord 
or prince that ever graced the upper circles 
of society. You cannot make all men equal 
even by holding a demonstration in Hyde 
Park. You cannot make the little man a big 
man, even by doubling his wages. There 
are certain unchangeable points in human 
history, and these relations—parent, child, 
husband, wife, master, servant—must remain 
for ever. But we can greatly improve the 


228 THE EPISTLE TO 





conditions, we can totally change the environ- 
ment, and we can make men feel that it is 
no disgrace to be working. I could tell of 
a great man, who had taken certainly three 
or four of the highest degrees in the univer- 
sity, who the other day was working in the 
subways and almost drains of London, that 
he might qualify himself to go to the very 
top of his profession. He would learn nothing 
by mere hearsay; he would work his way 
right up, and know everything about it. 
No navvy should excel him in knowledge; 
he would do it. Whilst he was doing this, 
his kind, tender-hearted mother, who thinks 
it a pity for any of her children to be 
working in a subway or a drain, sent him 
two sovereigns for a Christmas present; and 
the son, with a gracious smile, sent it back 
again, and said he did not need it; he had 
all he wanted to be going on with, and he 
_ was finding great comfort in his work. If 
men would take things in the right spirit, 
they would find sunshine where nobody else 
could find it. Meanness of heart, discon- 
tentment of spirit, peevishness of soul, can- 
not find sunshine in midsummer’s longest 


THE EPHESIANS 229 


day; but sweetness of soul and true obedience 
and right-minded manhood can find sunshine 
amid the snows of winter, amid the gloom 
of December. Hence we come back and 
back and back to these wonderful words we 
have heard before in these present readings: 
‘as Christ . . . in Christ .. . as the Lord 

. in the Lord.” That is the centre, and 
that is the explanation, and that is the 
music of it all. 

This, then, is Christianity in the family. 
It has a good word for everybody. It 
begins with the husband and the wife. It 
puts them into their right relation, and then 
it goes up into the nursery, and talks to all 
the little children in baptized language and 
baptized smiles, and watches them until 
they are seven, eight, ten years of age, and 
then until they are five-and-twenty, and 
leaves them for the nonce, saying, “ Now 
you are going to become husbands and wives 
yourselves.”” Then it goes into the kitchen, 
and into the stableyard, and into all the 
relations of life, and says, “ Here is direction 
for you, here is sunshine, here is music.” 
And when the question arises, ‘“ What is 


230 THE EPISTLE TO 


sunshine ?”’ and “ Oh, sir, tell me what that 
music is?” the answer never changes: “In 
Christ, as Christ, in the Lord.” The Apostle 
stands back in the temple of eternity, and 
gives out the law of development as men 
are able to bear it. 


Verse 10: “ Finally ~ 





* Finally,” and then, to soften the cruel 
word, ‘‘my brethren,” as if making brother- 
hood for the purpose of breaking it up and 
finding the sorest places in the heart. Please 
note the date of this discourse, then note 
the text, and then say if they be not appro- 
priate one to the other. ‘“ Finally” is a 
word which has many meanings. It is like 
a diamond with many facets—little faces, 
shining, glinting, gleaming, lights of faces. 
Do not let us roughly and peremptorily, as 
it were, dismiss the word “finally.” It fits 
the season well; there are not many words 
that could fit the hour more exquisitely, 
more pathetically, more poetically. Let us 
look at the meaning, the import of the 
word “finally.” 

First, it may be used in relation, as in this 





THE EPHESIANS 231 


case, to an argument, an expostulation, or 
an exhortation. The great magician and 
rhetorician has supplied all his arguments. 
He has supplied the heart with many an 
appeal; he has argued the case as a mighty 
man of intellect alone could argue it; he 
has presented it in the highest lights; he 
has shown how the argument develops a 
great decree and divine intent. Then he 
breaks away to an apparently subsidiary 
matter—entering the family, and giving 
exhortation to husband and wife, and parent 
and child, and master and servant. Then he 
is apparently weak; he hardly knows now 
how to bring the whole thing to a conclusion. 
The Apostle Paul often got himself into such 
verbal entanglement, but he always came out 
of it; and now, gathering his singing-robe 
around him, he says, “ Finally, brethren.” 
And, as if instantaneously, the higher light 
catches him, and he is away up to the 
highest level of his argument; and he ad- 
dresses a soldierlike appeal and challenge 
to those who have been listening to his 
argument and his appeal. That is a good 
“finally”; at all events, it is a “ finally”’ 


232 THE EPISTLE TO 


not without merit. But it is not the real 
“finally,” with sevenfold doom booming 
through its music. There is a grander 
“ finally’ somewhere. Yet we cannot alto- 
gether dismiss the pedant, the logician, the 
man of eloquence. He says in effect: The 
proposition is this; the argument I intend 
to establish is this; the illustrations with 
which I will light up the argument are 
these; and the personal applications which 
I intend to make are these; and I have 
spoken to each one of them as if he were 
the only person interested : and now, gather- 
ing up the whole thing into one grand 
appeal, it is this. And we say, “ Plato, 
thou reasonest well. It must be so; else 
why?” It is, however, one thing to yield to 
an argument, and another to obey it; it is 
one thing to be intellectually convinced, and 
another to be morally persuaded; it is one 
thing to have the intellect thoroughly satis- 
fied, as by chain-armour-like logic, and 
another for the conscience to rise and say, 
“J will do it.” Hence our lost poetry, and 
lost sermons, and our lost consciences.” 
Then we may, secondly, take the word 





THE EPHESIANS 233 


“finally” as indicating a completion—some- 
thing that was intended to be completed by 
the mind or by the hand, or in some way 
indicative of construction and purpose. You 
look at a statue, and you say, whilst your 
eyes are still on the wet clay, “ Yes, that 
will do; that is very good: I need not 
return.” The artist smiles, and says, “‘ You 
have hardly begun yet ; you must come back 
after a given time.” And you return, and 
observe that the statue is proceeding, and 
proceeding satisfactorily, and you say, “ This 
will be enough.” And the. artist says, “‘ No; 
we now want the high lights, and the half 
lights, and the quarter lights.” And you 
say, “Can you not dispense with these?” 
“Certainly not; if I am to speak from an 
artistic point of view, they would almost 
seem to be the most important part of the 
whole fabrication.” ‘But they mean so 
little to me.” “Yes, but they mean every- 
thing to the effigy. The question is, whether 
you are going to put yourself to a little more 
inconvenience, or whether you are going to 
destroy my reputation as a sculptor.” Does 
the artist rest because he is tired P_ Certainly 


234 THE EPISTLE TO 


not; that would be a mean idea. God did 
not rest because He was tired. God cannot 
be wearied, Omnipotence cannot be fatigued ; 
yet God rested. Why does the artist cease ?P 
Because his work is done. He can do a 
thousand more pictures quite as beautiful, 
or statues quite as exquisite and complete; 
but the particular work in question is finished 
—consummatum est. And so I hear a great 
wondrous voice in the ages, the stronger 
because of its weakness, ‘‘ It is finished.” 
In that sense, you see, the word “ finally ” 
has a special application. We do not leave 
the world because we are tired of it; we 
do not die because we are utterly depleted 
and exhausted as to our imagination of 
possibility and as to our claim of ambition. 
We say, “We have hardly begun to live.” 
But we die and pass on, because all that is 
possible in a given time and space has been 
done. “It is finished” is written upon our 
little fragment of work. The broken column 
in the winter cemetery is the dreariest of 
all pictures you can look upon, and yet so 
pathetic, suggestive, and in its way grand. 
What is all life but a broken column P_ What 





| 


THE EPHESIANS 235 


is man in his ninetieth, his hundredth year, 
but a broken shaft—marble fine enough, but 
the brokenness of it is the poetry and the 
meaning and the divinity of purpose. 

Then, thirdly, we may regard the word 
“finally” as indicating qualification. When 
you leave school, do you leave the world ? 
You only leave one world to get into another 
and a higher. Every school has written upon 
its portal qualification, or equipment, or 
_ preparation. When we leave school it is 
to proceed into a larger school—schooldays 
are never done. There are some things we 
can only begin, we can never complete them 
except in an intermediate and almost super- 
ficial and even worthless sense. When the 
apprenticeship is done and the indentures 
are burned, is the work finished? does the 
apprentice say ‘ Finally”? Only in an 
intermediate sense; he is going to be more 
an apprentice than ever, he is going to be 
a bigger man, a greater worker, a more quali- 
fied agent. Why those seven years under the 
sealing-wax? To get ready for the eighth 
year of manhood and virile energy. I see! 
Then apprenticeship does not end life? No, 


236 THE EPISTLE TO 





apprenticeship but begins it. There are many 
people who think that when they join the 
Church, as the phrase is, all is over, Christian” 
character is established and Christian intelli- 4 
gence is sphered out into a thing of admirable — 
completeness and beauty. Away! it is not 
so! When you joined the Church, in the 
sense of becoming a communicant, you only ~ 
began the real stress and often the real 
trouble. It was therefore but an intermediate — 
“finally”; it was good-bye to the devil that — 
it might be an eternal companionship with — 
God. Do not imagine that Christian charac- — 
ter is a completed act; never suppose that — 
by one act you have done all things. Weare 
not saved—we are being saved. Itisaverb — 
of constant action, a verb transitive, never 
losing but rather increasing its energy. We 
are undergoing a process; one day we shall 
be saved—oh, far-off, but glorious day! You 
are a young man and are serving what you 
term your articles. Are you a solicitor? 
No, I am being qualified to become a solicitor. 
Can you not qualify yourself by a given hour 
to-day? No, that is not within my power. 
Have you to slave on a few days or months 


THE EPHESIANS 237 


or a year or two longer? Yes, if you may 
call it slaving on; I have to attend, to serve, 
to pay attention, to acquire, and to prepare 
myself for a rather severe examination. And 
after that, what? After that, the bigger 
work, the fuller work; but without such 
preparatory arrangement and discipline I 
can never get into the rest of completed 
training. Why, it is the same with the 
training of the body. A man who is going 
into a real contest that has any meaning in 
it is not allowed to prescribe his own diet. 
That is very remarkable. Yes, but it is a fact. 
And yet in the Christian life a man under- 
takes to prescribe his own diet, and he takes 
it when he pleases, and lets it alone when he 
pleases, and he goes to church when he wants 
to go to church, and if he does not want to 
go to church he never looks near the place ; 
and then he expects the minister to turn him 
out quite finished in education and in spiritual 
culture. He plays the fool in the preparation 
time, and then expects to come out top of the 
list and with all the honours in his pocket. 
This cannot be done; life is not to be success- 
fully so played, so wrought, so developed. 


238 THE EPISTLE TO 





My friends must think of me not as dead, but. 
as promoted to a higher school, where I shall 
see my Lord and know as also I am known. 
There are intermediate “finallys,” little, 
partial summings up, trifling good-byes, 
which we shall forget ere a century revolves. 
We measure time so badly and take magni- 
tudes and quantities so absurdly that we shall 
be glad to burn all our little pocket-books — 
by-and-by; for we have put down the big 
as little and the little as big, and the whole 
process has been a ludicrous miscalculation 
and disproportion. Observe, therefore, when — 
we say “ Finally,” we may really be saying 
“Now, begin!” The finest epitaph I ever 
heard was in one line—‘*‘ Here endeth the first 
lesson.” There is nothing final in poetry, 
nothing final in spiritual imagination and 
contemplation. That a man should, have his 
arms folded on his breast and be laid down in 
his mother clay, and should have written on 
the marble Bible above his bosom, ‘“ Here 
endeth the first lesson!’’ So, let us remember, 
there are intermediate “ finallys,” some little 
ruptures. They look awful at the time. 
The surgeon says, “That is an immense 


THE EPHESIANS 239 


wound.” Relatively, it is immense; but in 
another relation it is nothing—not a blood- 
drop on a firmament. All the analogies 
are in favour of another life. I do not know 
a single analogy, which, fairly treated, points 
to death in the sense of extinction or anni- 
hilation. Why is the boy undergoing his 
education? With a view to profession—that is 
to say, he passes through the one world or life 
that he may enter the higher life or world 
that is to come. Why is this man sowing 
seed on the field, apparently throwing it 
away, scattering it in the air? What is the 
meaning of this lavish gift and this energetic 
idleness ? Why so? Because this is the way 
into the harvest-world, and there is no other 
way. ‘“ Whatsoever a man soweth that shall 
he also reap.’ You cannot help it. You may 
be agnostics, and atheists, and non-theists, and 
secularists, and positivists, and any other 
number of little tomfooleries you please to 
elect as may gratify the immediate palate; 
but you cannot hurt or hinder the great law, 
that whatsoever a man soweth he has got 
to eat it—eat it! 

What is true of individuals is true of 





240 THE EPISTLE TO 


nations. A bitter truth, a bitter aloes that 
corrects some evil internal condition. What — 
is this man or woman constantly going over — 
the scales for? If some tune were played, 
I could bear it; but from morning till night, 
as it appears to my impatience, it is all one 
scale after another, over and over again. 
What is the meaning of it? You will 
know if you will follow the man or the 
woman to-night. You will observe the 
gathering-up of all these scales and prac- 
tisings, and you will be thrilled by the 
issue. The greater the artist, the greater 
the student. When you hear the final music 
you will not begrudge the hours spent on 
the practice of the scales. So it is in 
every department of life. We think how 
easily this or that is done; we do not know 
the backlying process; we know nothing 
about the wakeful hours, the weary head- 
aches, the trying and trying again and 
again. All these things are forgotten; but 
when we hear the final outcome we are filled 
with delight, and we foolishly imagine that 
the man or the woman could have done so 
by simply doing it on the spot, without 


THE EPHESIANS 241 


any preparation such as would mean blood- 
shedding, trial, and loss of nerve—yea, and 
some pain of a small Gethsemane. 

So we have our intermediate finals, and 
we have a final that closes great experiences 
which we may carry with us into another 
world. Shall we know them there? Cer- 
tainly; all the analogies are in favour of 
that. There is one “finally” that we cannot 
escape. Every one of us must give an 
account of himself to God. We must all 
stand before the judgment seat of Christ. 
There is no discharge in that war; there is 
a bourn from which no traveller returns. 
Yet it seems that the little step between 
the staying and the going is so small that 
we might whisper across it. We do not 
require words of music, or tempests and 
roarings of thunder, because the little step 
only took place last night. He, she, cannot 
be far away by this time. May we not 
have one word of recognition, salutation ? 
No; for this time it is final. But only for 
this time; there is another time. To-day 
has not only a to-night but a to-morrow. 
We must not so live as to miss the chance 

16 


242 THE EPISTLE TO 





of meeting again; we must not shame our 

plighted word; we must be faithful unto 

death. And we shall be none the worse 

because of our weakness. There is a time 

when weakness may be strength, and when 

the less we have to say for ourselves the 

more our Christ may have to say for us, to 
us. His look is light, His smile heaven! 

Verses 10-13: “Finally, my brethren, be strong 

in the Lord, and in the power of His might. Put on 

the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to 

stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle 

not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, 

against powers, against the rulers of the darkness 

of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high 

places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour 


of God, that ye may be able to withstand im the 
evil day, and having done all, to stand.” 


We have already delivered a discourse 
upon the word “ Finally.” The words “my 
brethren ’’ somebody else has inserted, but 
the Apostle would not object to any one 
putting in such words, for they occur as to 
their spirit in many places. The man who 
said to the Philippians “I have you in my 
heart” would not object to any scribe inter- 
polating the words “my brethren” in such 
a connection as is now before us. 


THE EPHESIANS 24:5 


* Finally, my brethren, be strong.” Who 
says so? Who has any right to say so? 
And what does “strong” mean? There 
are some preachers who have no right to 
say “Be strong.” A sermon upon “ Be 
strong in the Lord”? may be a most wound- 
ing, offensive, and unjustifiable discourse. 
“Be strong” is a text that ought not to 
be taken up by every one; only the chief 
of musicians has any title to play on such 
a harp. But we who do not belong to the 
higher order of that class may preach upon 
the holy, gentle words according to a measure 
which I will presently specify. We cannot 
always hear the chief of the musicians; 
sometimes even his harp is out of tune, 
though we know he has a right to this 
music, for he has lived it. No strong man, 
a man whose strength has never failed, 
should dare to speak to the weak. He has 
no right in that sanctuary; he is disqualified, 
and he must be made to feel it. Who is it 
that speaks this word to the Ephesians, “ Be 
strong”? He calls himself “the man of the 
chain”; that is his literal style and title. 
In the hearing of the clang of that chain 







244 THE EPISTLE TO 


he says to those who are sore pressed, “ Be ’ 
strong.” What a thunderous power there — 
is in the exhortation of such a man! There — 
are many who sit in drawing-rooms and — 
read the news from the war, and comment — 
upon it languidly immediately before rising — 
to approach the tea-table. What a mockery! 
What do they know about war? But if 
a man, all scars, carrying the medal of 
wounds, should say to those who are fighting, 
*“T am sorry I am not with you, for my 
day is past—but be strong,” he would 
compel all wise men to listen. There is. 
nothing so offensive as preaching when the 
preacher knows nothing about the marrow — 
and core and innermost blood of the subject. 
I will not listen to him; he is no priest 
of God. He may have a regulation utterance, 
and pronounce it at a regulation time, but I 
shall not be there, God helping me. But 
I will listen to my father-brother who says, 
**T have been just where you are; I have felt 
every pang, every smart of the inconceivable 
agony, and by that right, and the experience 
which has come out of it, I would venture 
to say to you in the day of your trouble, 


THE EPHESIANS 245 


‘Be strong in the Lord.’” That whisper 
will find my heart. He knows what he is 
talking about. He does not deal in consola- 
tion as a merchantman, selling it at so 
much per ounce or so much per yard; he 
knows the whole mystery, and speaks out 
of the sanctuary of his soul, and the Lord 
doth clothe his words with power, and make 
him a kind of sub-redeemer to me in my 
darkness and helplessness. 

The rich cannot comfort the poor. The 
men who were born rich and have never 
had to do one single hand’s work for them- 
selves cannot talk to the poor. They may 
have speeches ending in still more verbose 
resolutions; but wealth can never talk to 
poverty. Poverty can talk the mother tongue 
of poverty. There may be rich men who do 
talk to the poor, and talk wisely, and with 
the fullest of good intentions and with the 
most unsuspected good faith; but they do 
not know the lingo. You can tell the 
foreigner when he speaks even grammatical 
English. Are we, then, questioning the good 
faith and tender sympathy of those men? 
Far from it. We honour them and love them, 





246 THE EPISTLE TO . 
z 
but they cannot do it. They would if they 
could; but he who has not been in the 
furnace does not know the fire, and he whose © 
cupboard has always been full does not know — 
what it is to cut the crust so that it will 
cover two meals. 
The free man cannot talk to the slave. — 
He has great periods of a rhetorical squash — 
kind, big as the great periods uttered by the — 
great Irishman Curran, one of the most elo- 
quent tongues that has wagged within the 
century or the century and a half. But it is — 
not talking to the slave. The slave says in 
effect, when Curran is done, “ What is the 
meaning of it all?” and if Curran should 
answer, “I am sympathising with the slaye— 
with you in your slavery,” the slave would 
smile as only a slave can smile. It cannot 
be done. There are transcendental impossi- _ 
bilities—things we cannot struggle up to, | 
because we lack the mystery and the spiritual | 
insight and ineffable music which alone can 
work the miracle of sympathy. Do we, then, 
question the sincerity of the sympathy? By 
no means—it is utterly sincere in many cases; 
but unless you have been in Egypt you do 


THE EPHESIANS 247 


not know what it is to make bricks without 
straw. Some poor old neighbour could come 
in and talk—not quite pure and grammatical 
English, but the sort of English that the 
heart knows and can interpret; and poor 
old Grief, lifting its brown apron and drying 
the tears from the eyes, would say, “Thank - 
you—you have done me good.’ So we are 
face to face with a man who knows the case, 
who knows what strength is and what weak- 
ness is, and who is in a kind of humiliation at 
the very moment of this speech ; and, lifting 
up his chained hand, he says to those who ‘ 
are in actual and possible danger, “ Be strong 
in the Lord and in the power of His might.” yi, 
He had a right to say so; the world will 
always listen to such a counsellor. i 
Be strong “in the Lord.” That may be ee 
described as a qualifying term. The ex- 
hortation is not “ Be strong,” but “ Be strong 
in the Lord ”’—in the strength higher than 
your own, in the strength out of which all 
true strength is originally derived. Have a 
sanctuary into which you can flee; make no 
svingham umbrella of some theory, and inven- 
tion, and speculation of your own indigestion, 


means, being turned into more words: “ Con- — 


nect yourselves with the Infinite; live, and _ 
move, and have your being in God. Have a — 
great temple of truth, a grand sanctuary of ; 
insight and companionship with the Eternal, — 
and let nothing come between your souls and 
daily communion with the spirits of just men 


made perfect, and with an innumerable com- 
pany of angels; and remember that even 
_ they, the sentries, derive their energy from 
“ Him who ‘ fainteth not, neither is weary.’” 
So many people do not know the meaning 
of such words; they live in events. That is 
’ how most Christians are practical atheists. 
: They think they are full of faith, when they 
are only reading anecdotes and waiting for 
the next edition to come out to see what the 
people on the other side have done. The 
people on the other side have done nothing. 
Why fret and fume about these events? I 
am so far akin to this great Apostle as to 
my soul’s aspirations and desires that I 
admire intensely the way in which he treated 
events. We make much of them; we sell 





THE EPHESIANS 249 


them ; and who would deprive a man of his 
livelihood even if he has been tempted to 
develop a telegram and invent news from 
the front? Where is the front? Who 
leads? I have watched the Apostle for a 
lifetime, and the way in which that man 
gathers events together and wrings their 
necks off is simply delightful. But we 
publish a large placard at the door that we 
will lecture on the great event of the week. 
Ah me! it hurts the Cross; it writes Ichabod 
on the altar and puts out the altar flame. 
But we call such preaching living up to the 
times. This man is a remarkable man for ad- 
dressing himself to the hour. Poor creature! 
I wish the hour were big enough to drown 
him, in his official capacity. How did the 
Apostle treat events that we think so serious 


and soimportant? Why, he treated them like | 


this: “Shall tribulation, or distress, or per- 
secution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or 
sword? Nay.” Ay, shall death, life, angels, 
principalities, powers, things present, things 
to come, height, depth, or any other creature? 
—all events in one catalogue; and he said, 
_ Nay, in all these things we are more than 


/ 


250 THE EPISTLE TO 


conquerors through Him that loved us.” q 
When we have a city of the mind we shall — 
have rest. When we live, and move, and haye ~ 


our being in God we shall not be the sub- 
jects of panic, or the victims of hot fever; 
we shall be perfectly quiet—in quietness and 


confidence we shall possess our souls. Oh ~ 


that we had hearkened unto His voice and 
obeyed His commandments! for then had 
our peace flowed like a river, and our 


righteousness had been as the waves of 


the sea. 

What shall we do in all the tragedy of 
lifeP ‘Wherefore take unto you the whole 
armour of God.’’ What is the second word? 
You are quite right; you have hit upon the 
pulse-word which so many of us are apt to 
overlook : “ Wherefore take.” Not “ make.” 
There is all the difference in the world in 
this connection between “taking” armour 
and ‘‘making” it. We have nothing to do 
with making armour of this kind which 
is intended for the defence and security of 
the soul. But this would dry up many 
sources and streams of invention and theory 
and speculation? It would, certainly. The 







¥ 


THE EPHESIANS 251 


Church has had so little to do that it has 
taken to image-making on a large scale. 
One man has a theory about the Atone- 
ment, and another has a theory about the 
future life; and he has changed that theory 
twice, and modified it three times, and 
published it, with footnotes and with an 
appendix! What am I to make of this 
theory or invention? He says, “I—I would 
not say so now.” I cannot rest upon the 
word which may be changed at any moment; 
so I build upon what I believe to be the 
word of the living God, the logosity of 
the universe, the inbreathing, outbreathing 
mystery of the divine oath. Do not go to 
the armour-maker to see what is good for 
your defence when the enemy, in all his 
manifold energy, is heavy upon you; every- 
thing has been provided in the Word of 
God. Again and again I would say, as I 
have said, “If you want a book to prove 
that the Bible is sufficient, there is only one 
book can do it, and that book is the Bible 
itself.” And I would say to many an in- 
quirer, ‘Have you read the Bible?” “Of 
course!” No, not “of course.” It takes a 


net 


— 


252 THE EPISTLE TO 






man all his seventy years to read the Bible; 
and when he is fourscore, and there is but 7 
strength, labour, and sorrow, he has not 
begun to read the Bible as one day he will — 
read the spiritual revelation in piri ; 
places. Everything is in the Word of God: — 
all truth, all beauty, all music, all love; for c 
God is in the Zion of His Word, and it — 
cannot be shaken. If people knew the Bible — 
as they know the newspaper, what another — 
world it would be! Have you read the 
Bible this morning? I thank you for your — 
silence—it is eloquent. We should read it : 
every morning. I believe we do break our 
fast every morning. We feed the body, and 
say to the soul, “Wait! when I have a 
convenient season I will call for thee and 
give thee some inexpensive and innutritious 
food.” 

What a wonderful view of the life of 
Christian experience is given in these words! 
which we shall utterly miss if we begin to 
explain. It is very neat and natty if we 
begin to explain armour, and loins girt 
about with truth, and breastplate, and feet, 
and shield, and helmet, and sword. That 


THE EPHESIANS 253 


is not to expound the passage at all. What 
is God’s view of human life so far as we 
can make out from this description and 
from this offer of grace? First of all, God 
knows that—human_life isa fight. It is 
something for God to tell us that He knows 
all about the battle. A God afar off could 
lecture us about the battle, and might 
deliver to us a course of lectures about it; 
but they would do us no good. But the 
Lord says to us, through the medium of 
His Son and through the ministry of His 
Apostles, “Souls of mine, life is a tragedy, 
a sorrow, a conflict, a daily agony; I know 
every pulse of it.” We have not a high 
priest that cannot be touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities, but in all points 
He was tempted like as we are, yet without 
sin. It is something to believe that God 
knows everything we suffer. What a fight 
it is! The devil is so strong, so wakeful, 
so cruel. He has nearly torn me to pieces; | 
he is a terrible opponent. He is not a 
metaphysical antagonist—he is a real and 
tremendous foe, and he has said to me many 
a time, ‘ Poor man! shut up that old book 






254 THE EPISTLE TO * 
of yours which you call the Bible: it is ; 
old and obsolete, and quite behind the march ~ 
of the ages.” Many a time he has said to — 
me in the last twelve months, “ Get off your — 
knees, you fool! and I will do what I can 
for you. As for Him, nameless, who lives — 
above the air, He cares nothing for yon, 
and you may dig seven more graves and 
He will scorn them all; rise!” Again and 
again he has said to me and to you, “There _ . 
is no utility in so-called prayer; it does 
nothing for you, it is but wasted breath. 
Do not imagine that there is anything above 
you but the infinite azure; and there is 
certainly no throne, no personality, no tender, 
condescending, redeeming Providence. Carry 
out your own will to the best of your power, 
and when it is your turn to die breathe 
your last; come!” And sometimes I have 
almost gone. But, blessed be God, not 
having gone, I preach the better after it 
all, with a deeper soul, a holier truth, a 
tenderer appeal; having been all but 
scorched by hell, I have come by that way 
nearer heaven. By whatever right this 
suffering may have entitled me to speak, 


THE EPHESIANS 255 


I venture to say, “ Be strong in the Lord, 
and in the power of His might.” To-morrow 
I shall be one year’s march nearer her and 
the Home. But the devil has relaxed nothing 
in severity, in cruelty, in opposition; he is 
the devil still. 

And _then, not only does God know that 
it is a fight, ‘but He provides for every 
aspect ¢ ct of it. He knows that we shall 
require a helmet, and a sword, and a shield, 
and that we shall require preparation for 
our feet, and all manner of defences; and 
He says, “ Poor soul! they are all here, all 
of them; you are welcome to them, I made 
them for you—not for angels, but for men.” 
It is something to know that the Lord has 
made provision for every moment of our 
time, for every aspect of our struggle, for 
every mutation of our fortunes. The 
moment we realise that, we are young, 
strong, triumphant. 

I judge, thirdly, from this delineation that 
the Lord knows the whole policy of the 
enemy. He calls part of that policy by the 
name “wiles”—little tricks and devices, 
pits dug in unsuspected places. He knows 


256 THE EPISTLE TO 


what it is, does this wily enemy, to make us 
stumble in our speech. He has a wonderful 
power in the clouds, he bewilders and con- 
fuses the poor struggling mind—and the Lord 
knows every trick of the devil. When I 
realise that, I say, “It will be well with me 
in this case also.” The enemy stopped my 
prayer yester morning, but I got it back in 
the evening; the Lord was more than the 
enemy. My soul’s opponent endeavoured to 
tempt me to commit myself to false principles 
and hazardous issues, and just whilst I was 
thinking whether on the whole it might not 
be better just to give way in this instance, 
the Lord swept the devil and his tricks out 
of my road, and I came to church, the 
sanctuary, and the altar, and it was well with 
me. And it will be well with you, suffering 
‘brother. You have your difficulties at home, 
4 in your business, in your church, and princi- 
pally in your own heart. Be strong in the 
Lord ; never try to stop the inrushing stream 

_ of fire which shoots from the volcano of hell 
_ with the last tract on secularism, socialism, 
agnosticism, and the various other little in- 
| ventions of irresponsible minds. Understand 


THE EPHESIANS. 257 


that you are now hearing a man speak who 
has been through the whole case, who has 
suffered, so far as man may have suffered 
on this earth, the torments of the lost, and 
who has had to fight the enemy at midnight, 
and who found out soon that he could not 
fight that enemy with straws, but only with 
the steel of Heaven, the panoply of eternity. 
The Lord knows, therefore, what we are doing.. 
He says in the first instance, “‘ Withstand”’— ‘ 
be obstinate, do your very best, uttermost, 
that, having done all, you may get away from 
“‘ withstand ” into ‘withstand ’”’ without the 
“with ’—and having done all may stand. 
We owe everything, under God, to the men 
who have followed that policy. A great 
martyr said to his brother when they were 
going to the stake, “ My brother, this day we 
shall light a fire in England that will never 
be extinguished.” So they went as it were 
hand in hand and heart linked with heart to 
light a fire, and it burns to-day; and I ask 
those of you who are in sympathy with such 
spiritual heroism to see to it that that fire 
never goes out. Do not be little creatures, 
miserable, paltering debaters about whether 


17 


258 THE EPISTLE TO 


this should be a preposition or that should be 
an adverb, or whether we should stand to the 
east or stand to the west or fly to the north. 
Do not talk about these things, but light 
a fire for God that shall never goout. Young 
men of England! I ask you to be strong. 


No man could have invented this expres- 
sion. It brings with it some sign and token 
of its divine origin. The most of things 
that are in the Scriptures are things that 
never would have occurred to the mind of 
man. Hence I stand by the old argument 
that the Bible is a book which no man 
could have written if he would, or would 
have written if he could. The uniqueness is 
part of the argument. “The whole armour 
of God.” Is there any mere poetry in the 
word “whole”? Is it employed or intro- 
duced in order to perfect a rhetorical climax P 
or is there great weight of meaning in the 
word “whole”? Is it the emphatic word in 
the exhortation ? or are all the words on one 
high level ?—the monotony not of weakness 
or weariness, but of completeness. We must 
revert to our own spiritual experience if we 





THE EPHESIANS 259 


would receive a sufficing answer to these 
inquiries. Could we do without the word 
“whole”? What does the word “ whole” 
stand for in this connection? It stands for 
completeness. There must not be one piece 
of the panoply overlooked, nor must the 
places and arrangements of the armour be 
for a moment changed or otherwise related. 
The provision of the divine grace is complete ; 
we are armed from the head to the foot, 
there is no unprovided place or spot in all 
this divine clothing with spiritual steel. But - 
is there any meaning in the word “ whole”? 
Yes, there is great meaning in that word. 
Consider what the exhortation would be 
without the word ‘‘ whole,’ complete, entire. 
It would be a different command or exhor- 
tation; the military tone would be taken 
out of it. It would sink into a very poor 
admonition. There is a kind of gentle 
severity in the very language, and specially in 
that one word. “Whole armour.” Consider 
what it would be if we missed any one of 
the pieces. A man is panoplied all over 
except the helmet. Then he is doomed, no 
matter how muscular he may be, how alert, 


260 THE EPISTLE TO 


how determined. Suppose a man is panoplied 
all over except the shield. He is lost, no 
matter what his sword may be, or his helmet 
of brass; if he has no shield, his heart is 
exposed. Suppose a man is armed all over 
except the sword. The foe mocks him, asks 
him to produce his sword of straw, laughs 
at him. Does the foe deride him simply 
because he is wanting in one solitary piece 
of armour? That is precisely what the foe 
does. The armour is not to be looked upon 
as consisting of pieces; although it is given 
in detail, it is only given in detail in order 
to mark the solidity of the unity of the 
panoply. The armour is only enumerated 
that it may be totalled, brought to one 
grand fitness. 

Many persons are armed in places. If 
nine points out of ten are attended to, these 
people suppose that they are very well pro- 
vided for; but they are not. You have shut 
up all your castle, every window, every 
door, except the postern gate—the little gate 
behind, the small door that a small burglar 
may pass through. All that is wanted is 
not an army of burglars, but one little 





THE EPHESIANS 261 


child-burglar that can creep through an un- 
guarded pane of glass. Enough! the castle 
is in the hands of the thief. How notice- 
able it is that people are very fond of pet 
graces and favourite virtues, and how they 
dangle these before the eyes of those poor 
creatures who are not similarly created or 
provided for at those special points. It is 
heart-sickening, it must hurt the Saviour! 
How the mean creature who does not thirst 
for strong drink mocks the poor creature 
who, under the pressure of three generations, 
burns to drink the fire-fluid! The Pharisee 
holds himself erect, and says in the audience 
of the people, “I do not need stimulants; I 
have no craving for strong drink! Other 
people can surely do as well as I can.” 
Hold thy tongue, thou servant of the pit! 
Thine own brother mayhap may have an 
unquenchable fire in his throat, for which he 
is not so broadly responsible as may be sup- 
posed at first sight. The generations come up 
again ; we reap old harvests. Our forefathers 
are living in us; they heat the blood; they 
should be twice damned. ‘The evil that 
men do lives after them.” So it is through 


en 


262 THE EPISTLE TO 


the whole gamut of human experience and 
spiritual utterance; we are apt to be proud — 
of the particular part of armour which we 
have, and to torment other people because — 
they are not equally strong at the same 
points, though they may be stronger at other 
points in the clothing of the divine panoply. 


Let us be merciful, let us be tenderly — 


gracious; the people who are more easily — 
tempted than we are know it, mourn it, — 
cry over it in unknown places and in 
darkened hours—too well they know their 
weakness and their shame. Do not let us 
who are not tempted in such directions hold 
ourselves up as stupendous models of be- 


haviour in some other direction. A man 


may not be drunk, but his soul may be 
steeped in covetousness, which is worse than 
drunkenness. A man may not be led away 
by his passions, but he may be greedy, 
selfish, self-considering, proud—and pride is 
worse than any sin that stalks about the 
city in the night-time. We condemn sin at 
wrong points, or we exaggerate some sins 
and practise others. Hence the beauty, the 
force, the necessity, of the expression or 





THE EPHESIANS 263 


commandment, “ Put on the whole armour.” 
Every inch of it, be equally strong at every 
point; ay, and it will take thee all thy 
time to panoply thyself in the steel of God. 
The Christian life is a hard life; when it* 
is otherwise it is not the life Christian., 
Jesus Christ laid down this condition at the 
very first. He said, “The badge of all our 
tribe is a Cross; every man must bear His 
Own cross, every man must carry the cross 
at the heavy end. Except a man carry his 
cross daily he cannot be My disciple. He 
may have some kind of unpractical admira- 
tion of Me, he may even say very fine and 
attractive things about Me; but he knows 
nothing about My salvation—that salvation 
represents a garden of agony, a cross of 
shame, a brand of dishonour in the eyes 
of the world.’ Who, then, can be saved ? 
That is no question for us; that is not our 
inquiry. When we do put it, in our heat 
and ignorance, Jesus says, ‘‘ Strive ye to enter 
in at the strait gate.’ Do not inquire how 
many people can get in at the strait gate 
and walk along the narrow road, but strive - 
ye, every one of you, as if ye were the only } 


264 THE EPISTLE TO 


creature in the universe to enter and to walk 
along and to fight the devil day by day. 
What wonder that the Christian religion is 
not popular, and that Jesus Christ is at the 
foot of the list of the religions of the world ? 
Herein is that saying true, “ He that is first 
shall be last, and he that is last shall be 
first.” The statistical tables will be reversed, 
and are being reversed with every process 
of the sun. 
Tf we look at this panoplied man, we 
shall find that he is a living parable. Many 
written parables have fascinated our imagina- 
tion and delighted our hearts, and even 
comforted our hearts in times of sore distress ; 
but here is an incarnate parable, a living 
picture of the complete man. Everything 
upon the Christian man has a meaning. We 
know what this is in ecclesiastical attire. 
It is foolish to mock such attire and to ignore 
its possible and even holy symbolism. You 
inquire the meaning of this part of the 
apparel, and the explanation is given to you. 
It is symbolic. It is nothing in itself; and 
if it were taken away from the rest of the 
attire, what would it be but a piece of cloth, 





THE EPHESIANS 265 


or linen, or silken ribbon, or dumb drapery ? 
But set in its place, interpreted by the truly 
ecclesiastical genius, it has a meaning, and 
a meaning not to be despised; but if the 
meaning be exaggerated or misplaced, then 
it will become an offence. The captain of a 
ship will tell you, as I have heard him say, 
“‘ Every passenger who comes near me when 
I am standing looking over the sea says, 
‘What is the meaning of this chain, captain?’ 
‘What is the meaning of this arrangement 
for turning the machinery ?’” ‘The captain 
may well get wearied and tired of answering 
such questions, for they occur day by day, 
and on every voyage—on the voyage out and 
on the voyage in; the same ignorance asks 
the same questions, and the same petulance 
gives the same keen and almost resentful 
or uncivil replies. Carry the idea up to 
its highest levels and meanings, and the 
signification is this: that everything that is 
provided for the Christian’s attire or accoutre- 
ment is symbolical, is a sign, so that the man 
thoroughly equipped for the fight is a living 
parable read by well-trained eyes. The 
parables flush with beauty; listen to them as 















266 THE EPISTLE TO 


a voice, they tremble with ineffable music. 


matciialism; and have signed the oan 
condemning materialism, we go out and 
practise it. So many people get rid of things 
by signing them away. Many persons would — 
be very religious if their signature could be 
accepted as a sacrifice. That is where the 
point of agony occurs. If by signing aaa 


Christians, we would sign at once; we ¢ 2 
always prepared to sign, and we are exceed- 


his signature to the same credenda. 
signing is not crucifixion, and “ except a man 
take up his cross ’—not write his name—* he . 
cannot be My disciple.” Christianity is know ne 
by its hands and its side; no wound-prints _ 
there must mean no Christ in the heart. Of 
course this doctrine will empty the churches ; 4 
praised be God, it will drive people away who 
ought never to have been there. But if some 
remain, they will be of the real quality, and — 
he real quality is always in the majority ; not 


THE EPHESIANS 267 


in a majority numerically, but in a majority 
spiritually energetic, influential, and sove- 
reign. 

It is wonderful in reading over this panoply 
to discover how much of it is meant for 
defensive purposes. It is not all meant for 
aggression. Christianity is both aggressive 
and defensive. It is astonishing, I repeat, 
how much of the Christian armour is for 
purposes defensive. The helmet does not 
fight, it protects; the shield does not aggress, 
it secures, defends, protects the very heart 
of the warrior. We need a great deal of 
defensive armour. The devil is wily. If 
there is one little heel spot missed in the 
Christian Achilles, that little vulnerable heel 
will be found out and some great assault will 
be made upon it—mayhap the injection of 
some deadly poison; and injections are not 
accompanied with noise or with an uproar 
that is supposed to betoken heroism and 
angry strife; injection may be silent. The 
morphia is inserted with hardly any sense 
of pain; the digitalis makes no noise when 
it gets into the life and helps the poor labour- 
ing breath. So there are many noiseless 


268 THE EPISTLE TO 


temptations, there are many assaults that are 
not suspected; and therefore this saying is 
true, ‘“What I say unto you I say unto all, 
Watch ; resist the devil, and he will flee from 
you.” But to be called to all this arming 
and watching and fighting and agonising 
expectancy—is this the way to life eternal ? 
Yes, and other way there is none. 

It is very noticeable that a great deal of 
this combat is‘ what may be called hand-to- 
hand strife. It is not a discharge of ball 
and other missile over a space of miles; it 
is wrestling. Two men do not wrestle when 
they are standing five miles apart, nor a mile 
apart, nor a yard apart. It is when they 
are grappling, one with the other, seeking 
for the tightest place, watching every move- 
ment of the antagonist, anticipating and dis- 
counting it; the uplifting that there may be 
the downcasting. Sometimes the Christian 
warfare is just as hand-to-hand and arm-to-arm 
as this. Jacob wrestled ; we speak and sing of 
wrestling Jacob. The record says, ‘‘ Now there 
wrestled with him,” and the wrestlers were 
so near to one another that the one touched 
the thigh of the other, and it shrank, and the 





— = ' - FP 


a 


THE EPHESIANS 269 


shrunken muscle abides there till this day 
.to tell what angel tussles there have been 
in the dark nights of spiritual experience. 
It is not enough to watch the agonies 
which other men undergo. We cannot 
always follow even our own brother into the 
dark Gethsemane. Every man must fight 
his own battle. We can help him up to a 
given point. It is the same with what men 
call grizzly, gruesome, cruel death. You can 
accompany a sufferer it may be in some cases 
up to the very last half-hour, or the last 
fifteen minutes, or the last five minutes; but 
he must go the rest alone. No two souls 
ever go together within a certain compass 
of time. It may be shorter, it may be longer, 
but there is a period in which the whole 
action becomes solitary ; there is no discharge 
in that war. There is, apart from Christian 
sympathy and succour, but one relief I have 
ever found, and that relief is this—that I 
too must go alone; that is a relief. How 
easy to die! how hard to live! How de- 
lightful to breathe the last breath away! 
how terrible to turn from the chamber in 
which the victory has been won, and to go 


270 THE EPISTLE TO 


out into some other room desolate with un- 
utterable misery! And as in the hour and 


article of death there is this hand-to-hand 
wrestling with the great foe, so all through 
life there are days when nobody can be with 
us, hours when we are most social when we 
are most lonesome, strange grey times when 
our dearest surviving friend would hurt us by 
the very breath that is balmy with blessing. 
So we find in this great combat the lonely 
hour, the sacred strife, the contest that has 
no help given to it except from God; and 
God is most when we need Him most. 

Is this armour all to be turned against 
the enemy? No; it is to be turned, so to 
say, but to say it with tenderest reverence, 
sometimes against God. Howso? The proof 
is here: Having equipped yourselves, then 
follows the command or exhortation, ‘‘ Pray- 
ing always with all prayer and supplication 
in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with 
all perseverance and supplication for all 
saints.” Does the Lord make an armoury 
that can be employed against Himself? 
Yes, in a certain sense; but that sense 
must be very carefully and even tenderly 





THE EPHESIANS 271 


distinguished and discriminated. The action 
is this: “The kingdom of Heaven suffereth 
violence, and the violent take it by force.” 
And God, having armed the men, says, ‘‘ Now 
come and take My kingdom.” God is willing 
to be overthrown. The angel was willing 
that Jacob should throw him, as it were, in 
some great struggle. This is part of the 
condescension of the divine mercy. Some- 
times a father wants even baby to deal some 
heavy blow of tenderness upon him ; he means 
to yield only by force in a certain construc- 
tion of that term. And God says, ‘“ Now 
that I have given you the whole armour, the 
entire panoply, now come and let us fight, 
- and you shall win; you shall overthrow Me 
in the agony of prayer.” Do not go to God 
to fight Him in your own strength and in 
your own panoply, and say, ‘Now I have 
made ample preparation for taking the fort 
of Heaven.” No man can ever take the 
celestial fort; it must be surrendered by God 
in, answer to prayer. He waits to be gracious, 
He waits for you to take it. He says, “Come 
and prove the armour with which I have 
clothed you.” “Prove Me now herewith, 


272 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 


saith the Lord, and see if I will not open 
the windows of heaven and pour you out a 
blessing, river upon river, until you are not 
able to receive it.” He clothes us with 
armour that we may, so to say, violate His 
very presence. He waits to be violated. 
He watches the whole movement. He loves 
His children. He loves them to win in the 
great contention. 


: 


The | 
Historical Geography 
of the Holy Land 


Seventh Edition. With Scripture Index and Six Colored 
Maps, specially prepared. 8vo, cloth, 730 pages, $4.50 








- » + No one work has ever before embodied all this variety of material 
to illustrate the whole subject. His geographical statements are pen-pictures. 
We are made to see the scene. No important problem is untouched. With- 
out question it will take its place at once as a standard work, indispensable to 
the thoroughgoing student of the Bible. — Suxday-School Times. 


. . » Anexhaustive collection of material lay outside the plan of the author. 
His intention is rather to show how the history of the land is conditioned by 
its physical structure. Itis thus the idea of Karl Ritter which rules the treat- 
ment and presentation. Very comprehensive sections are concerned, not with 
the history, but with the nature of the land. . . . The author pays special 
attention to the military operations. One could sometimes imagine that an 
officer is writing, who, above all, regards the land from the point of view of the 
military strategist. In this connection especially the history of Israel in its 
chief crises in Old Testament times receives striking illumination. Large pas- 
sages are frequently quoted from the Old Testament in order to explain them 
by the exhibition of their geographical background. In addition the author 
has a special gift of vivid representation. He makes the history transact itself 
before the eye of the reader in dramatic form. One sees, everywhere, that the 
landscapes which he describes stand before his own eyes. Thus the book is 
an extremely valuable means of aid to the understanding of the history, espe- 
cially of the Old Testament. — Prof. Scutirer, of Kiel, in the 7ieol. Litera- 
tur-Zeitung. 


The book is too rich to summarize. . . . The language is particularly well 
chosen. Few pages are without some telling phrase happily constructed to 
attract attention and hold the memory, and we often feel that the wealth of 
imagery would be excessive for prose were it not that it is chosen with such 
appropriateness and scientific truth. . . . To the reader much of the pleasure 
of perusing the volume comes from its luxurious typography, and the exquisite 
series of orographical maps prepared by Mr. Bartholomew from the work of 
the Survey. These maps alone are more suggestive and enlightening than 
many treatises, and they are destined, we trust, to enliven many a sermon, and 
turn the monotony of the records of Israelitish wars into a thrilling romance. ~ 
Speaker. 


a 





A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
3 and 5 W. 18th Street, New York 


By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D-D., LL.D. 


THE BOOK OF ISAIAH — 


In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, sluth, $1.50 each. 


VoLuME I. CHAPTERS I].—XXXIX. 
VouuME II. CHAPTERS XL.—LXVI. 


This is a noble volume of a noble series. Isaiah will ever be the cream of ” 
the Old Testament evangelistic prophecy, and as the ages go on will sw 
seed-thought of the Holy Ghost which grow into flowers and fruits, vines 
and trees, of divine truth for the refreshment and nourishment of the intellect, 
heart, character, and life. How can any pastor or instructor of the te, 
young or old, afford to be without such aids ?— Baltimore Methodist. 

Prof. George Adam Smith has such a mastery of the scholarship of his 
subject that it would be a sheer impertinence for most scholars, even tho’ 
tolerable Hebraists, to criticise his translations; and certainly it is not the 
intention of the present reviewer to attempt anything of the kind, to do which 
he is absolutely incompetent. All we desire is to let English readers ae 
how very lucid, impressive — and, indeed, how yivid—a study of Isaidh is 
within their reach ; the fault of the book, if it has a fault, being rather that # 
finds too many points of connection between Isaiah and our modern world, 
than that it finds too few. In other words, no one can say that the book is 
not full of life. — Spectator. 

It would be difficult to say how highly we appreciate the work, or how 
useful we believe it will be. — Church Bells. 

He writes with great rhetorical power, and brings out into vivid reality the 
historical position of his author. — Saturday Review. 

Mr. Smith gives us models of expositions; expositions for cultivated con- 
gregations, no doubt, but still expositions which may have been largely 
preached in church. They are full of matter, and show careful scholarly 
throughout. We can think of no commentary on Isaiah from which the 
preacher will obtain scholarly and trustworthy suggestions for his sermons so 
rapidly and so pleasantly as from this. — Record. 


The Book of the Twelve Prophets 


COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR 
In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.50 each. 


Vout. I— Amos, HoSEA AND MIicAH. Seventh Edition. 
Vou. II.— ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH, 
HaGGalI, ZECHARIAH I.— VIII., ** MALACHI,” JOEL, 
‘ZECHARIAH” 1X.—XIV., AND JONAH. Fourth Edition. 

In Dr. Smith’s volumes we have much more than a popular exposition of 
the minor Prophets. We have that which will satisfy the scholar and the stu- 
dent quite as much as the person who reads for pleasure and for edification. 
. . . If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it is not because 
anything more can be done to make them attractive. Dr. Smith’s volumes 
present this part of Scripture in what is at once the most attractive and the 
most profitable form.— Dr. Marcus Dons, in the British Weekly. 

Few interpreters of the Old Testament to-day rank higher than Georg 
Adam Smith. Heis at home in criticism, in geographical and archzological 
questions, and in philology. . . . Hardly any commentator of the present day 
ss more successful than he in putting the student at once into the heart of an 
Old Testament problem. — S. S. 77mes. 


The above four volumes are contained in “ The 
Expositor’s Bible.’’ and are subject to special sub- . 
seription rates in connection with that series. 
Descriptive circular on application. 


A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
3 and 5 W. 18th Street, New York 
























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